I don't know when it started, but my File Explorer became extremely slow, taking a long time to open each folder. Even opening multiple windows made my computer extremely laggy, making it unusable.
I restarted my long-unused Windows updates for this, but it didn't work. I deleted Start11 (used for transparent taskbars) which might be related, but it didn't help.
Until I came across this article: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/51979415
The author talked about his Explorer frequently consuming a lot of CPU and memory resources, pointing out that Explorer has plugin functionality, and the issue was caused by plugins. He disabled problematic plugins using the plugin management tool ShellExView, resolving the lagging issue.
However, I didn't install the same plugins as the author. Then, I saw a comment mentioning that his issue was caused by Baidu Netdisk's plugin:
And I do have Baidu Netdisk, so I decided to try using this software.
The article provided the download link for ShellExView, which I'm quoting here:
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview-x64.zip
Following the instructions, I disabled all plugins related to Baidu Netdisk directly and restarted explorer.exe using Task Manager.
At this point, when I browsed folders using File Explorer, I was amazed to find everything running so smoothly.
Although I don't know what the Baidu Netdisk plugin did, my computer has finally regained its youth.
I want to thank all the authors who provided solutions!