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.