That has not been my experience with vim (over the past ~12 years). I don't run a huge amount of plugins, but I do use a few. The only thing I have a noticeable occasional lag with is the parinfer clojure plugin (in neovim, and its more that the plugin lags before applying its changes rather than vim itself lagging - the author does acknowledge that its currently sub-optimal). Syntax highlighting has never caused any issues for me. I wonder why you are having issues... that does sound rather annoying.

I was also referring to the typing latency as measured by the benchmarks here: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ As you can see, vim's text input latency is measurably lower than most of the other tested editors on most platforms (zero-latency IDEA seems to beat it in some cases).