Rendering Speeds dropped dramatically

Hi, I’ve been using Premiere Pro 2025 (v25.1) and Media Encoder (v25.2) on my M2 Max Mac, and everything was working perfectly until a few days ago. Suddenly, AME began “verifying” again when I launched it, as if it reinstalled or updated. Since then, my render speeds have dropped dramatically (like one frame every 2 minutes, mind you im only doing multicam edits so I've never used any heavy processing/effects), and I noticed my system barely uses any CPU or GPU during export (Activity Monitor shows ~88% idle). The renderer is set to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal), but the dropdown is greyed out. Another odd behavior: Premiere now only creates one audio preview when rendering, instead of generating a separate preview for each clip like it used to. I also noticed that my usual /var/folders/... temp cache files for Adobe are no longer populating — and my media cache seems to have moved entirely to a v24 folder, even though I'm using v25. I'm concerned something broke during an update or reinitialization. I’ve tried clearing the media cache, updating scratch disk paths, and even reinstalling, but the issue persists. I also tested the same export on another Silicon Mac and experienced the exact same issue, which makes me think it might be a broader compatibility or version problem. I do want to ephasize that I haven't changed anything in my setup. Any ideas on what could be causing this?