Why does the game freeze for 5 seconds when entering new rooms?

I was getting so anxious; every time I entered a new ruin, the screen would just hang for 5 seconds, totally breaking the adventure. I first tried disabling disk indexing in Windows, but loading only improved by a measly 0.5 seconds, which felt like a joke. I then used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to bump the queue depth from 1024 to 2048. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K random reads jumped from 55MB/s to 72MB/s per DiskSpd, and CrystalDiskInfo confirmed drive temps remained a cool 48-55℃ during the process.