The performance, at least on our cloud instance, has greatly improved. There was a period of time where every load was causing the side bar and other components to slowly load with skeletons everywhere.

There are still skeletons but a lot of the page components load instantly(cached) and others load quite quickly.

Tons of UI "jank" has been cleaned up across Jira and Confluence. The UI design, in general, has also finally cleaned up nicely and "settled".

Confluence articles load very fast now. They have also added Live documents which is a very welcome addition.

Is Jira still bloated? Yeah, but that doesn't preclude improvements. It feels less bloated now to me.

YMMV.