Spinning beach balls

Am I the only one who can barely work in the latest version of Premiere?

As soon as a sequence starts to get a bit complex, everything starts to slow to a crawl. Scrubbing is jerky, playback is slow to start and then sometimes won't stop for several seconds. Even this simplest things, like duplicating a sequence, copying and pasting clips, or just changing the timeline display gives me the spinning beach ball for 5-10 seconds.  I hadn't experienced any of these issues to such a degree in previous builds.

I've tried several things to try to determine if there was somethings specific in my sequence that was causing the issue, including dismantling the sequence layer by layer, removing archival clips that were different frame rates, and flattening multi-cam clips, but nothing seemed affect the lagginess.

I will say that I had just converted my project to a production hoping to save time on opening and saving. This is really when I started noticing the lag issues.

As for tech specs, I'm using 25.2.3 on a 2017 iMac running Ventura 13.7.5. I am also working with proxies of nearly all of my footage.