To the trash heap you snappy applications. Thank god for electron based IDEs.

Needless complexities have simply crept in other parts of the machine.

There were always applications that were snappy and applications that were dog slow; sometimes even the same application with different releases. And that's still true today.

In fact, I would argue that the objective experience of responsiveness has not meaningfully changed at all if you stick the average, except that speed and capacity are much more available if you are willing to spend even a little bit more time and money.