Yes, when you say that you use NTFS, it’s enough. Because exFAT uses 128kiB cluster size, you unlikely changed the cluster size for NTFS, so it’s not relevant.
In your case the only problem, that the filewalker and seems retain (search for “ERROR”/“failed” and “retain”) cannot finish their work, thus deleted data is not cleaned up from your node.
Did you remove the decommissioned satellites?
Since this problem often happen with virtual setups or network storages or SMR, I convinced that the problem in the huge response time of the storage, when the filewalker is trying to traverse all pieces on the disk.
Usually adding memory for the file cache can help, or perhaps you need to use a primocache or configure cache writes, but you must have an UPS in this case. The other way maybe to use a tiered storage with SSD.
You may also try to disable a lazy filewalker, it could finish faster with a higher priority.