Technically speaking function:
is dormant until you open System from main menu. This is where the eligibility is triggered for “Instal to Disk” checks. This is part of the upcoming change and tested in this thread: [BETA] Raspberry Pi boot from USB/NVMe
As a note - tested 3.631 on three Raspberry Pi 5 in a row and all finishing boot in 57sec flat from MicroSD with or without alleged culprit. Something else is going on.
Question - do you observe interface drop in debug logs?