> but most programs feel actually slower than before

I feel like this is only true for people who happened to luck out with slightly overpowered hardware in very specific time periods.

As someone who used pretty average hardware in the windows 98/2000/xp era as a teenager even a low end modern laptop with an ssd running Windows 10/11/KDE/Gnome/Whatever is massively more responsive even running supposedly bloated webapps like vscode or slack.