If you have any torrent service running maybe try stopping that temporarily and see if that helps. I was having a similar issue with stuttering and found another person mentioning qbittorrent as the culprit.
I spent 100$ on a cheap e-waste bound Dell. All proprietary parts so the power supply didn't have any extra power cables I could see for another drive.
With that being said I'll take another look just to make sure. As a lot of other people have said a second drive for holding the data would for sure be ideal.
I do have my own normal.windows PC that I could just dump it all onto. My Proxmox install I am not worried about its really just my one VM that I have spent weeks on now getting my various services setup on.
Can the VMs be moved separately? If so, that would make this a lot easier to just move them to a USB and install the new drive.
This was a save I started prior to 2.01 and before I had the DLC.
If you say you can see it I wonder if that mod inadvertently disabled the effects for the launcher as well. I will try to verify the game files tonight.
I think it would be hard to argue that having more accessibility options would be bad.