Why does Expeditions: Rome freeze at 90% during map loading?

Deploying the Roman legions was a grand experience, but I noticed the loading bar constantly stalling at 90%. I tried partition alignment in Windows Disk Management, but it had zero impact on loading times, making me very cautious. I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to force the read queue to 512 and optimized the I/O algorithm. Random 4K reads rose to 68-75MB/s per CrystalDiskMark, and drive temps were 48-56℃ per AIDA64.