The convergence of corporate rent seeking and a ballooning market cap for user data makes the decision to retain ownership of your data feel very empowering.

Is the SSD also your boot drive?

Could be that the long sequential reads of loading a new area (or anything with big files) is hogging all the sauce.

Sops provides tooling to implement encryption and delegates the actual encryption to other tools (like age).

Have you seen ssh-to-age? It generates an age keyfile from an SSH key. I love that I can effectively repurpose my SSH key(s) for my sops workflow.