OP specifically said except for load times.
But I agree with the lower posts. It doesn’t really matter to performance with regards to the QUANTITY of mods active. It’s more down to what the mods do and if they are all making stuff happen in the same view at the same time as you’re flying.
I have only a handheld PC with just 16gb ram and even with my current profile of nearly 800 items loaded (around 460gb, spread over various drives even an external USB disk for my planes and liveries) it’s not a problem. Performance only dictated by what the mods are if they are individually heavy or not. I don’t have issue with waiting longer for it to load. It’s about 5 mins I suppose. Even empty it’s 3 minutes so that’s fine by me.