Okay, not sure if this list is still being updated, but an adblocker like Blokada 5 (go for 5, the 6 is not free and not sure if is better) is almost essential now-a-days.
Other one i can recommend is f-droid, there you can find open source apps.
Well, my cpu is good (R7 5600x), but a potato as gpu (gti 1050 ti), and a trimmed folder of 25GB of mods only.
When i started i got about the same loading time, but now it is visibly longer. Given that i saw people with over 100GB of mod folder, i think the loading can take a while if you have...
after windows 98, every other release is good,(or maybe the one before was soo bad that the new one looked good).
For the The Sims, every release is a side step. Make some things good, others bad.
About the loading time, yes it is fast if you don't use many mods, if you go to that rabbit hole...