Expedition 33 seemed to have to recompile shaders regularly but never for 15 freaking minutes for things to take effect properly.

Most other games will just say something like:

"Some changes require a restart to take effect"

Maybe B4 tried something new where instead of a 2 minute restart, it fucks up your game for up to 15 minutes?

Like, shit is unusual, but I don't have the game, I'm just going off what I see in articles.

Yeah, tbf though I play through proton a lot, but any time I change resolution (like say, when I play through moonlight on my steamdeck) I get hit with a "compiling vulkan shaders" before the game actually launches on top of any compiling shaders in game. It's usually pretty fast but there's a few times it'll take a while, and it happens on windows too, my partner had a bunch of times this week where they hit extended load in times (BL4 in particular) because of it.

I want to say ME Legendary Edition had periods where it'd compile shaders, some others for sure I recall needing to as well, ME:A, DA:I and Veilguard for sure I recall having to wait a bit.