Relinking Media Problem

I support a large team of creatives who are editing various projects and am running into an issue within the last few weeks of projects taking up to an hour to re-link media every time the projects are opened in Premiere Pro. We have done extensive testing to rule out our network, the machines, the OS, the media, plugins, order of operation, and app version.

This is becoming a major problem and we are hoping to get more insight as to what the cause is. We're currently on Premiere version 25.5.0 on the MacOS platform.

What we've tried:
Different OS (Sonoma, Sequoia)
Different Machines (M1, M2, Max, Ultra)
Disabled all plugins
Cleared cache and preferences
Uninstall/Reinstall
New projects with media files located entirely on local drive and on network location with no difference
Turned off Visual Analysis and disabled media cache analysis