Usually one would start with "is there a measurable performance bottleneck here?" :-P.

TBH i haven't played Elden Ring but from what i've seen there are so few "active" NPCs around that i highly doubt there'd be any performance issue coming from this.

Yeah I doubt it, in terms of scale you get at most dozens of enemies, and I can't imagine their behaviour is at all expensive compared to everything else. Every "mode" (idle, attack 1/2/3, etc) is relatively slow as well.