What I believe is going on is that for small updates it's issuing a lot of IO to create a restore point; meanwhile for large updates it's essentially issuing 16

What I believe is going on is that for small updates it's issuing a lot of IO to create a restore point; meanwhile for large updates it's essentially issuing 16-30GB of IO to do a complete reinstall of Windows. I base this assumption off the fact that an artifact of these large feature updates is a `Windows.old` directory they use to power their 10-day rollback feature. For the smaller updates turning off system restore helped immensely on my NVMe-based system, however I've noticed MS seems to re-enable it after every major feature update. (Of course, they muck up a bunch of my other settings as well, so I guess that shouldn't be surprising.) The only solution that worked for me, long-term, was installing Linux.