If it is mostly your own tooling you may want to look at setting up a dev drive. It is supposed to be more optimized around workloads that would normally spin stuff like defender off the rails.
System -> Advanced ->
-> For developers -> Developer Mode [on]
-> Dev Drive -> Create Dev Drive
I need to write the blog post. I keep being told this, and it’s not the solution.
After a reboot, on an NVMe dev drive with no disk encryption, first launch of our internal application (unreal editor) takes 9 minutes on my workstation. If I disable windows defender before launching it, it takes 30 seconds. If I add all the processes as exclusions, and add the workspace folder as an exclusion to defender… 9 minutes.
edit:
I didn't mean to direct this at you. I mean that it's somehow gained traction as being the solution to slow filesystem access, but the reality is it's just broken.