Massive CPU spikes and crashes since patch

Before patch, everything consistently ran fine at 100+ FPS, never once had a crash. Since, I cannot get half way through a map without the PoE client completely pegging all of my cores causing the game to stutter heavily and eventually crash.

Specs:
i5 9600k
RTX 2060 Super
16GB RAM
Windows 11
Steam client

I've tried messing around with different settings but have most things on their lowest settings or default. DX11, triple buffering off, etc.
Things seem to run fine when idling in hideout, still getting my normal 120fps, the slowdown happens within combat zones. I've also spent 2+ hours in game since patch in various zones so all of the caching should have happened by now. I've also gone through the common issues post and tried just about every recommendation, but there has been no improvement at all.

I tried to take a recording of the issue but the PoE client hard pegs my CPU so badly that running OBS causes the game to crash before I can do anything. Here is a screenshot of in-game performance graphs in-map.

Well, that answers part of the question. I was wondering if my hardware had suddenly become sufficiently outdated that I needed to upgrade despite it running just fine prior to the patch yesterday (IIRC).

So, clearly a patch problem. I just had a multi-second freeze on a Blood Aqueduct run during some testing. Fortunately the character far out-leveled the area so I didn't need to worry about the character dying and getting hit with the EXP penalty (when are you folks going to get rid of this?).

Anyway, for the curious.

i5-4690
RX-470 4 GB
32 GB RAM
Win 11
Steam client

I've also tried setting everything to the lowest setting. I've even tried the single core setting (which seemed to help a bit but not much) considering the CPU that I'm using.

Same here, changing to Vulkan from DX11 helped to smooth things out and made crashing less frequent, but with lots of things happening on the screen it still happens. I'm running a new character through the campaign, first temple run with Alva resulted in crash just now.

Ryzen 7 3700x
RTX 3060
16gb ram
win 10 64bit
steam client

Im having the same problem with about the same specs, have you learned about how to solve it?