Transferring from Premiere to Media Encoder takes a long time. Didn't used to

I've been using the Adobe suite for about 3 years now. Back when I first started using it in 2015, I swear that when exporting from Premiere through Media Encoder, it would take very little to no time at all for the data to transfer to Media Encoder. I could hit "Queue" in Premiere, then click over to Media Encoder, and the file would already be ready to encode. I could hit the "play" button and start the encode right away. Maybe I would have to wait like 10 seconds at most. No matter how big the timeline/project was (be it 1-min video or a 2 hour video) it would always just shoot right over to Media Encoder once I hit "Queue".

I feel like something has changed in maybe the last year or so... now it ALWAYS takes forever to transfer over. Even 1 min timelines take like 5 minutes to transfer. Longer timelines can take ever longer...

What changed? Did Adobe change something about the way Media Encoder transfer the data over or something? Why did it go from always working like a dream to always being so slow? It's like this on every computer I work on, so I know it can't be on my end. It has to be something the program is doing now that it didn't used to do 2-3 years ago.