I know you said that you checked the health of your SSD, but did you use the manufacturer's program to do so? I find SMART tables aren't nearly as accurate for solid state drives as they are for spindle drives.
It's unlikely that it's the CPU. I recommend, if you're able, to grab a copy of Parted Magic and boot into that live environment to see if the issue persists. Any live distro will work but I highly recommend PM since it is packaged for troubleshooting.
I tried it maybe a week ago but got frustrated with a bug. The app was locked in landscape mode. I have auto rotate disabled, but enabling it did not fix the issue. No worries though. The mobile page is quite nice.
There's no reason not to use both. I prefer Kbin but using a Lemmy instance with wefwef is pretty good too. I find myself alternating between the two.
Might nab the Mortal Kombat trilogy. I didn't realize they were rereleased to work natively on Windows.
A fresh install, in theory, would always be better or preferred. That being said, Windows has improved a lot, so much so, that many users don't reinstall the OS every 3-5 years like many did decades ago.
So if you don't notice any problems, you're probably okay. Still, it would've been better to just install Windows 11 from the start.
It's fantastic for emulation and 2D/3D retro gaming. I find I play more indie titles too, partly due to their charm and uniqueness but also because of their smaller file sizes.