Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips

I once made the mistake to buy some sound effects from Fab, I had to download the entire Unreal Engine and start it to create a project to then import the assets..

It took the whole afternoon

It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, you need an insane machine only just to run the editor..

State of the art graphics pipeline, but webdev level of bloat when it comes to software.. I'd even argue electron is a smoother experience tan Unreal Engine Editor

Insanity

It's just like your computer and IDE, you start it up and never shut it down again.

Wouldn't it taking the whole afternoon be because it's downloading and installing assets, creating caches, indexing, etc?

Like with IDEs, it really doesn't matter much once they're up and running, and the performance of the product has ultimately little to do with the tools used in making them. Poorly optimized games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, that's rarely down to the engine. Maybe the complete package, where it's too easy to just use and plop down assets from the internets without tweaking for performance or having a performance budget per scene.