TLDR; disable VMD in bios
I had the same problem. New-ish Lenovo intel machine making a very SLOW and tedious install that appears to hang during install. Verbose install showed many nvme nvme0: I/O timeouts, but if you let it sit for several hours it would eventually get to the installation gui.
After that point, I had additional extreme slowness with selecting the partition.
It dawned on me that there could be an issue with the harddrive controller. After some digging into all the intel specific acronyms in the BIOS, I decided to troubleshoot by disabling/enabling each option.
For my situation, I found that turning off hyper threading and disabling VMD controller did the trick.
Once VMD controller was disabled, the time to load the install gui was seconds instead of hours.