I actually really enjoyed reading this write-up, and kudos to the author for doing the deep dive.

But as someone who has been modding games since the early 2000s, whenever performance issues come up, disabling the mods is usually my first step when diagnosing issues. The author explains why this wasn't his first instinct (given the warning signals), but testing from a vanilla state is always a good methodology IMO.

It would have been nice to know which plugin is problematic and why. My curiosity is unsatiated.

I feel rug pulled by the fact this turned out to be external mods to the game.

“My installation is non standard” should probably be disclosed early.

Very cool that the author was able to use a profiler without source code and even add debug symbols, but...the actual conclusion (a third-party script using a third-party scripting system the author had installed but never mentioned until the end was the culprit) was so obvious of a first thing to check that it made the post feel a bit contrived.

It's like if someone wrote up a post detailing a step-by-step teardown of their vehicle's engine to determine why they were suddenly getting worse gas mileage, only to end with "oh, you know what, it's probably the giant always-open drag parachute I installed right before I started getting bad gas mileage. Let me try removing that now that I've ruled out every accessible part of the engine."

Great write-up. Curious to know what's going on with the video though.