My guess here is that it isn’t Denuvo, it just seems like it’s not designed for Open World games. These issues all also exist on console, where Denuvo isn’t a problem (although it certainly isn’t helping either). Dragon’s Dogma 2 exhibited a lot of the same poor performance and stuttering nearly a year before MH Wilds came out.

By then, I assume the game was too far into development to change course, with it’s ambitious design and a lot of AI that has to always run in each area adding to the engine issues.

Honestly… I’m not sure how much better they can make it, given how much time they’ve had to work on it, and that DD2 never really escaped its issues too. It feels like RE Engine was just… fundamentally not designed for this, no matter how great an engine it is in its niche.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.