Weird "HDD Mode" behaviour on an NVMe SSD

So wondering if anyone else has experienced this bug(?) where "HDD Mode" in Settings - Utilities is set to "Auto" as is default I believe, but it behaves like it is set to "On", despite the fact that the game is running an NVMe SSD, and not a mechanical HDD.

In my case this is a 2TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus. From what I understand the Auto probably auto-detects the drive, but what would cause Cyberpunk to think my 990 Evo is an HDD? The seq read speeds are about 7 gigabyte/sec from crystaldiskmark.

I noticed this because there are loading screens where there shouldn't be any (I don't remember there being, at least).

For example: there are loading screens during "Run This Town" and "I've Seen That Face Before" when you activate the Behavioural Imprint-synced Faceplate.

There are also loading screens when you use the "Switch Camera" button on a car affected by a "Take Control" quickhack that's relatively far away but not out of Signal Range, so still under player control.

When the setting is manually set to "Off" the game functions normally without these strange loading screens and performance is the same. When the setting is set to "On" the behaviour is identical to the setting "Auto".

My other specs are GPU: RTX 3090 and CPU: 9800X3D and 32GB of RAM, so i can't imagine that's the cause.

The game runs perfectly smoothly at 1440p with DLSS Quality with RR and Path Tracing with the frame rate locked to 30 and staying a solid 30 throughout regardless of the setting.

Could mods be the cause of this? I have tons of mods but nothing that should touch optimisation, game settings or anything of that sort.

Quite mysterious.

I'm wondering if anyone else has this same experience. If this issue is not limited to my machine, then there may possibly be first-time players playing through the game in a degraded state, not realizing they are seeing loading screens that shouldn't be there.