What are you editing with? H.265 / GoPro 11 woes

I've been trying to use the free version of Davinci Resolve to edit some clips together from my GoPro Hero 11 and the performance has been really poor. I think the root of my problem is two-fold:

1. H.265 is not GPU accelerated (both decode and encode) in the free version of Davinci Resolve.

2. Davinci can't smoothly playback 2.7K / 240 FPS in the timeline if it's H.265. My timeline resolution is 60 FPS but it's choppy when I try to play these 240 FPS in the timeline. It'll play fine for like 2 seconds, then drop frames for another 2 seconds, and so on. I actually think this might just be a Davinci bug because there's no reason this should take up like 50% of CPU across all cores just to play. There's no overlays, no effects, nothing other than the raw clip sitting in the timeline.

I have a Ryzen 5950X, but the choppy playback in Davinci is really making editing a nightmare. Supposedly the answer is to generate "optimized media" or make it use proxies, but generating the optimized media for like a 5 minute clip is going to take at least 30 minutes and the filesize is going to be massive. I've got about 75 GB of footage to edit (~1 hour?), but I think the proxy media is going to be like over a TB in space (is that right?).

Also, some people try to use the LRV files as pregenerated proxies, which would be sweet, but they're in a lower framerate so I don't think Davinci is going to properly account for that. Edit: Yeah, Davinci 18 doesn't even let you do it - it says "Please select a proxy clip with a matching framerate and overlapping timecode with 'GXblahblah.MP4'".

Any tips on using optimized media? What's the best format for disk space?

Is the "Studio" version of Davinci faster for playback in the timeline? Does it use the GPU for that?