Premiere Taking a LONG Time to Open a Specific Project

I have a project that (seemingly) out of nowhere decided it was going to take forever to open and copy/paste clips between sequences. It was working fine, then at one point it began taking 5-10 (sometimes longer) minutes to load the project. I have no issues like this with any other projects. The only thing distinguishing this project from others is the amount of footage involved (about 2 hours total from a Sony FX6).  I do have audio and video plugins as well, but nothing I haven't used multiuple times on other projects. Copying any clips takes far longer than it should. Even selecting 10 second clips to copy causes the computer to "think" for a good 30 seconds. I have tried opening this project on my other machine, and it behaves the same way, so that tells me it's not computer specific in any way. Here are some things I thought might be causing this, and what I tried (to no avail) to correct it:

- Large volume of clips in one sequence (I put them all on one for transcribing and ease of finding specific segments from script). I deleted this sequence, only leaving smaller ones. No change.

- Plugins might be causing a problem. I started Premiere with third party plugins disabled. No change.

- STILL thought it must be related to plugins somehow... so I literally deleted the plugins from each clip's effects. No change.

- Large volume of large files (clips). I made all clips offline. No change.

- Large amount of images, as I've had Premiere be finicky in the past about images (even though these are 1920x1080 pngs @14451451). I deleted all images from the project completely and tried reopening it. No change.

- Dynamically linked sequences, for animations or rotoscoping. But as soon as I have these in AE, I delete them from Premiere. Can't see how they'd still be affecting anything.

- Cleared cache. No change.

- Reset preferences. No change.

- Reverted to previous version. No change.

Something about trying to read from the project seems to be the problem. If I send something to Media Encoder or try to export straight from Premiere Pro, I get the same delay in "reading" the project as I do when I initially open it. Besides copying and pasting, everything else runs smooth once I can get the dang thing open. Any ideas? Here are the specs for both machines I've tried it on:

Mac Studio w/ M1 Ultra, 128GB memory, Sonoma 14.5

Macbook Pro w/ M2 w/ M2 Max, 96GB memory, Sonoma 14.5

Thanks!