Power Query Performance Issues

I'm having severe issues with Power Query in Excel.

The .CSV files that we are referring to locally are no larger than 67,000 rows.

My local i7 Surface Pro's fan would be going crazy because we're hitting 100% CPU all the time.

Considering that the project I am working on is extreme time sensitive, I fired up an Azure VM Instance. Running Standard D8s v3 profile of 8vCPUs and 32GiB RAM. Still freezing up and making the CPU run at 100%.

And this is just for the preview refreshing!

What's going on? The .CSV files it is referring to are just over 100MB in size, and this is just the data transform - there is no complex data science packages or anything - just merging tables. 😞