Obnoxiously long load times making game unplayable

Apologies if this isn't the correct forum to post this in as I only saw a tech support forum for PoE 1.

The game is literally unplayable for me because of load screens. I've tried to play several times in the past 48 hours and the load screens have been so bad that I actually used a timer this morning. In 3 hours of real time, about 2h40m of it was "play" time. The other 20m was time just spent recording times or walking away to get a drink (which I paused the timer for). Of this play time nearly 1h50m of it was load screens. The times were made even worse because if the load screen takes too long you get disconnected.

Changing areas? >30s load screen (if it doesn't disconnect from taking too long to load)
Press U to open the map? Load screen. Close the map? Believe it or not, load screen!
Open the waypoint? Still load screen.

All graphics settings are on minimum. I've tried using DX12 and Vulkan. I added an exception to Windows Defender. I used the packcheck tool. I completely reinstalled the game. I did a clean install of my graphics driver.

Opening or closing the map ("U" key) as well as the waypoint and this happens:
https://ibb.co/ZRVMF1y2

Cinematic tries to play?:
https://ibb.co/Jw4QwP36


My system specs are:
i5 9600k
RTX 3060ti
32gb DDR4
Windows 10

Speedtest >500 Mbps down and up speed

I'm at a loss for what else to do.

Similar issue where.
i5-8500k + geforce 4090, windows 11.

loading screens are 30s or minutes. Tried different render engines, all the reddit tips

I understand this is early access, but I never expected to drop items on the ground instead of TP because it takes 5 minutes to get back to the zone.

I had this problem in the previous patch, but this patch made it much worse

Edit: I think I will just cool this game for a while. I don't really want to wait 30seconds every time I tp, die or change zones

Load times on my friend's PC are crazy, like 2-3 minutes to load into a zone. Makes trading for him near impossible since most folks bail before he zones into their Hideout (or he gets to town). Other games on that PC run great.

We've tried DX11, DX12 and Vulkan. Used the Nvidia app to optimize the game. Tried reinstalling. Tried Windowed, Fullscreen Windowed and Fullscreen. Enabled XMP on the CPU in the BIOS (this actually made it worse!). We're out of ideas for why this game loads so slow.

SSD: Samsung 860 Evo 500gb
CPU: Intel i5-8400
GPU: GTX 1070 Ti
RAM: 32 GB