Yes—Lightroom can be made more usable with a workflow change rather than a single setting.

A practical approach is to keep recent photos on your laptop while you’re actively editing them, then move older shoots to the NAS once they become less active. If you move folders, do it from inside Lightroom so it keeps track of the files correctly.

Also, build Smart Previews for your RAW files. Smart Previews are stored locally and let Lightroom use local proxy files for much of the editing, browsing, and sorting work, which reduces how often it has to pull full files across Wi‑Fi. That can make the experience noticeably smoother when the originals live on a NAS.

So the best Lightroom-specific optimization here is:

• keep active work local
• archive older work to the NAS
• generate Smart Previews to minimize network traffic during editing and culling

This won’t eliminate the network bottleneck entirely, but it can reduce the impact a lot.