What is dev-fuse.device and why does it extend boot time?

Trying to see if I could speed up my system boot I ran systemd-analyze plot > bootplot.svg . Everything seems normal except for dev-fuse.device that starts at 7.7 sec and then shows as activating until the entire boot process completes at 24.1 sec. Everything else is shown as active after 10.3 sec (when the various network related services are activated) until the last services related to the graphical desktop start. I've tried googling `dev-fuse.device``` but have come up with nothing.

What is dev-fuse.device? Why does it take so long to activate?

The output from the following commands that may provide necessary info is at https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/53pBp43jMH/

cat /proc/version
cat /etc/*-release
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /etc/fstab
free -m
sudo blkid
sudo lsblk -f
sudo lshw -C memory 
sysctl vm.swappiness
sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda
sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sdb
systemd-analyze blame
df

Swap appears to be configured correctly and all the disk UUIDs in /etc/fstab match up with the info from sudo blkid and sudo lsblk -f. The machine dates from 2012 so I'm running in Legacy mode rather than EFI. Running systemd-analyze blame | grep "dev" doesn't find an entry for dev-fuse.device.