Went through the same thing at our photo studio back in 2021. We were stuck on a 20 up plan and clients were losing their minds waiting on raw files, so we moved to fiber with 500 up and it changed everything. Downloads only went from 200 to 300 and nobody noticed, but uploads going from 20 to 500 is what actually saved us. Turns out sending files is the whole job, not pulling them down.

Calling it a second pass kind of undersells what you're doing, because what you're describing is two different jobs. First draft is just getting words on the page, then editing is a whole separate skill where you cut and move stuff around. Once you stop trying to do both at the same time, the freezing goes away, and that old guy at the library knew exactly what he was doing when he shared his messy page.