Why does the loading bar stall at 50% in Expeditions: Rome?

Every time I entered a new campaign map, the loading bar stalled at 50%, which was a true test of my patience. I first tried disabling the Windows Indexing service, but loading time only decreased by 1 second—completely futile. I then used GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the queue depth from 32 to 64 and optimized the write cache strategy. Loading time dropped to 18s per GamePP Timer, with temps at 40-50℃ per AIDA64 and 4K reads at 35-42MB/s per CrystalDiskMark.