Infinite Loading Screen When Entering Maps or the Game

Since 0.5 I'm getting extremely long loading screens when entering maps, changing areas, or even opening the character selection screen.

The weird part is that my FPS is actually good once I finally load into the game (around 100 FPS on Vulkan), so it doesn't feel like a pure performance issue.

I already tried:

- reinstalling the game
-changing graphics settings
-Vulkan/DX12
-texture settings
-hardware upgrades

But nothing really fixed it.

It almost feels shader-related, like the game keeps recompiling or reloading shaders every time.

Older PoE2 versions also had this sometimes, but once an area had already loaded before, future loading times were much faster. Since 0.5 it feels like everything reloads every single time.

Have the devs mentioned this issue anywhere already or acknowledged that something might be happening with loading and shaders since 0.5?

Anyone else having this issue in version 0.5?