Endless Premiere Beachballs

I upgraded my M1 to an M3 MAX 128MB RAM in hopes of stopping this madness. Premiere 24.1 does not crash, but I swear it was faster on the M1, even when running After Effects at the same time - $5,000 dollars ago. Now there are more beachballs than a Flaming Lips concert, even on pausing or starting playback. I uninstalled, reinstalled. Cleared the cache. Previews are set at 1/8. Nothing helps for more than 10 minutes. I'm working off of an SSD drive, where autosaves and cache files are going, too. Assets (16 TB worth) are on a SanDisk Professional 22TB G-Drive. How do I find a bug report? How do I find out if my file is corrupted? Any suggestions, please!