There are potentially some opportunities for performance enhancement:

I have 19 drives scanned, with ~27Tb of data. App startup takes several minutes while the indexes are loaded on an M2 Max. Optimising this would of course be very useful, but there are ways to make it less problematic. Once the drive list has been populated, you could remove the modal and report the index loading as a non-blocking status element (locking out the appropriate UI elements for search/drive interaction etc until the indexes are fully loaded). This could then potentially allow unrelated operations to take place (adding new drives, for example) without having to wait for the indexes to load.

Also, there are lots of instances when backend processing makes the UI unresponsive or affects the speed of animations. It could be worth looking at thread priorities etc to ensure that backend operations don't affect the performance of the UI.