Needing to download 40GB when games already installed

So I have all my games installed on a external hard drive and I did a windows reset, but before I did that I unplugged my external drives, backed up anything on the main C drive and put it on my E drive which is my 2 HDD in raid mode, then unplugged them (while pc off) and did my reset.

But... when I reinstalled the EA app and went through, set my download file to the location it needed to be, and pressed play on BF1, BFV, it went and found the games no problem, go to do BF2042 it doesn't recognize it, so I then find a trick to do repair game it finds it but now its  saying its got to download 44.68GB, my game file size is where it probably should be at 130Gb, original game size was around 86GB but with the updates etc its obviously more now.

It wouldn't be a issue but, I did nothing to change it, And due to not having proper internet and just going off of cell hotspot tethering with lots of data that's shared me downloading 40GB in the middle of the bill period isn't ideal.

I find it so stupid how the EA app has been out for a few years now and we STILL don't have proper ways to locate game files, steams awesome I can just plug in my external drive to my laptop and or PC and it recognizes it quickly and I can just jump into any of my games... not the case with EA app...

Really annoyed as I've been away from 2042 for a bit and wanted to play and grind out the season stuff before its done... I've tried a few different things