I’m aware that Blender doesn’t respect the viewport display when loading projects, but it’s extremely irky to go around my layouts and turn of rendering preview everywhere each time.
I think this decision should be revisited as there are number of ways to load a project that might fail due to the render preview. You can uncheck ‘load UI’ in the file dialog as well as append a project into a new one. Both methods sound like a viable failsafe method for a problematic project file and should not hinder the default experience.