I just upgraded to the new version of Unity and then tried to start Unity with my current project. It has been over an hour now and Unity still says it is importing assets. Is this normal and when will it end? Can I ever get back to work?
It depends.
It definitely can take that long, on a multi gb project even half days to days if you run on single spinning harddisks.
Raid is faster, SSD is much faster.
A thing that can help is disabling the antivirus guards running in the background while the work takes place
if its a 100mb raw data project targeted at web then it shouldn’t take that long 