Why does The Last of Us Part II crash in large city environments?

It was unbearable; just as I sneaked up on a target, the game crashed to desktop, wiping all my progress. I tried setting virtual memory to half the remaining disk space, which maxed out disk utilization and increased the crash frequency. I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the depth from 1024 to 2048 and enabled write cache flush. 4K random reads improved to 65-72MB/s per CrystalDiskMark, write speeds hit 800MB/s via CrystalDiskMark, and temps were 45-58℃ per HWiNFO.