Thanks for your insight! Speak of the devil, after three hours and four reboots, pagefile suddenly shrank back down to about 800MB. That was the issue.
I normally run a pretty tight ship (for Windows 11) and idle at around 28% memory utilization. Even while gaming, I don’t remember ever maxing out the system memory. I guess Windows just needed time to deflate pagefile…
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.