CodeIgniter very long loading times under Xampp and Wamp server

As a test, I had set the view code to

Code:

<h1>Test</h1>
<p>Hello World!</p>

So only this static HTML. Still > 8.4 seconds.

I just tested whether this was the case with a brand new version of CodeIgniter. And found out: No. It is incredibly fast, as you would expect.

So I went and recreated the whole project and copied the relevant data controllers, models, views, etc. over. Only replaced the adjusted config files.

The only thing I didn't restore was: https://github.com/mihatorikei/codeigniter-vitejs

So I suspect it had something to do with it. Do you have any recommendations, perhaps outside of Vite, on how to ideally reduce JS and CSS size?