Preloading reaches up to 17GB of memory and 25GB in virtual memory on my machine. Behavior is like this: when i start the game it slowly starts to eat ram, after maybe 45 seconds it fills it all, than it returns to around 2.5 GB memory used. Without it - meaning disabled Preloading - it only takes around 1GB of memory. I don't see the point to use this feature as i have NVME SSD drive capable of ~7000 MB/s read speed. I have also 32GB RAM laptop. And have been using SSD drives on SATA or NVME interface for years now... No need to do some "preloading". I don't think thats also relevant to Microsoft Windows 10/11 versions. I have been using both of them and that Preload worked exactly the same, every time on both of them.
However also more games use technology named
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. That's a real deal feature. Not the Preload which is now nothing more than a ram hogging feature. Although it might be useful feature just to test how much stable is your machine when program is bloating that machines memory.