> How about apps in a time-limited multitasking workflow?

I once worked with a taxi company whose despatch system ran on QNX. During peak hours average call times were around six seconds and the system had to be very low latency and reliable. The UI was designed entirely on getting the relevant information from the caller and into the system in that six second window. It was text-only, made heavy use of keyboard shortcuts, and used predictive text before that was even a thing.

The “industry” can design performant systems when there’s money on the table.

Yep. Look at tools for software engineers. Intellij runs incredibly fast on a large modern computer given what it does. Git is insanely fast given almost every command is a process starting from scratch, and then often scan your entire repository. And VS code is probably the poster child for getting good performance out of electron.

But I think we only have performance because we're spoiled for choice. People just wouldn't use these tools if they were slow. (Or they'd get fixed). In other industries, thats just not the case.

I have a friend in Australia who's a doctor. Apparently the computer system they use to look up medical records sometimes just freezes for 30 seconds at a time while it does who knows what. Its a real operational problem. But the procurement process is so complex that it'd be almost impossible to get someone who knows what they're doing to come in and fix the issue. Or hospital could move systems - but that'd probably cost them millions of dollars. Its crazy.