How to fix 3-4 second screen freezes in The Last of Us Part I loading?

Every time I switched scenes in the Seattle streets, the game would freeze for several seconds without warning, which gave me serious anxiety. I first tried updating the SSD firmware, but loading times only decreased by a fraction of a second and the hangs persisted. I then accessed the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configurator to increase the queue depth from 32 to 128. This fixed the bottleneck; 4K read performance rose to 65-72 MB/s per CrystalDiskMark, SSD temps held at 45-52℃ per HWiNFO, and read latency peaks dropped per CrystalDiskInfo.