See if my response in another thread helps (see link below).
Adobe bridge 2021 mac version causes very heavy GPU load on activity monitor
Some said it did help. It’s based on the idea that high CPU/GPU usage might be because Bridge builds high-quality previews of all items in a folder as soon as you view that folder. But by changing settings, you can set Bridge to use low-quality previews first, and defer processor-intensive high-quality preview rendering until an item is selected, or on demand only.
You say “without opening an image” but Bridge and other file browsers don’t “open” images to edit them (except when you open an image in Camera Raw). They view whole folders, and that is why this can be so processor intensive. If Bridge is pointed to a folder containing 200 items it will start rendering previews for those 200 items, and the computer will be busy until 200 previews are done. Unless the settings are changed.
If changing the Bridge preview generation settings help, then this isn’t a bug. Lightroom Classic has similar behavior which causes similar complaints, and there too I prevent CPU/GPU issues by having it use embedded previews first and not render previews until I ask it to.
This issue may have gotten worse lately because sensor and display resolutions have gone up. 200 1:1 previews of 36-megapixel raw images are much more intensive to generate than for 12-megapixel images. Or if the previews are set to display size, 200 previews for a new 4K display are much more intensive to generate than for a 1080p display.