All of these extra steps should not be necessary to do, as a few seconds of delay carry on is normal. 60+ seconds is not, especially when this is something that was previously working.
I opened a ticket with Steinberg support and although we didn’t find an answer to the problem, we did find a workaround. The workaround was to create a brand new fresh empty project and then I manually imported my existing tracks in and re-applied my plugins. Voila, it’s functioning as expected now. It was a few minutes of extra time to redo everything, but it was worth it to get rid of the problem.