How to fix the 90% loading hang in No Rest for the Wicked?

Every time I entered a new area, the progress bar would hang at 90% for seconds; this latency is pure torture. I tried using Windows Disk Defragmenter, but it did nothing and just increased SSD wear, leaving me very dissatisfied. I then used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configurator to force the write cache on and set the queue depth to 64. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K random writes improved to 58-65MB/s, and HWiNFO64 confirmed temps at 44-50℃.