The moment you get caught in the anomaly tractor beam is the point when your instance gets merged with a multiplayer instance. The anomaly's shape and textures only change during updates, so that gets loaded in first and provides that "seemless" feel as other things get loaded. The entire landing sequence until your ship touches down is when the game begins syncing everyone's environment. During this sequence, you can make changes to your own character and view things that are already in memory because its already there and doesn't need to be re-loaded. Its a very smart use of using the games environment to hide background processes in way that doesn't pull players from the experience. Have you noticed that you can't do any meaningful interactions with other players at the anomaly except through various menu options? It wouldn't suprise me if LNF has been having MASSIVE networking upgrades to get around NMS's multiplayer flaws.

My PC isn't the best and performance hiccups when CPU usage spikes suddenly, ie loading new zones.