Uh huh. Speaking as someone who (stupidly) bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor at launch and expected a 12900KF and a 4090 to be able to play it stably -- the game ran like absolute shit until the patch where they announced they removed Denuvo. They'd done all manner of patching to that point which made absolutely no difference for the majority of people, but miraculously, when they removed Denuvo the performance across the board was exponentially higher. Traversal stutter is still there, but it's extremely minor and is aligned now with every other UE4 game's traversal stutter.
But yeah, I guess that was just a surprising coincidence that the performance issues almost entirely resolved themselves the moment Denuvo was removed, and that they didn't in the previous 8 patches.
So now imagine that you upgrade to a fast SSD and the latest CPU and GPU and you still get traversal stutter because the game and engine are poorly optimised