M2 Mac mini writing excessively to disk.

For the last year I have booted my base model M2 mini from a 1 TB SSD connected by USB 3.0.

During that time it has written about 4 TB to the disk which I think is reasonable.

17 days ago I started booting from a 1 TB Thunderbolt NVMe and yesterday discovered to my horror that it had already written 1.2 TB.

There appear to be 3 main culprits writing excessive amounts since yesterday when Activity Monitor was zeroed.

Can anyone explain why I am seeing this massive increase in writes and more importantly how to stop it?

The original external boot drive was Sonoma and the new one is Sequoia.