Tired of people bringing up that "article" and the sensationalist media headlines. All that articles shows is that the CPU, given 100% utilization, does the same result as it did on iOS 10. Really surprising for sure. So what was the point of you posting that article? People saying "Apple is slowing my device" don't actually mean "the CPU has become slower". There goes the entire premise that benchmark. The CPU is the same—the software is less optimized for older hardware. The net effect? The software runs slower (and in some cases much slower) than older versions of the OS.

The real rebuttal of "slow" claims should be to look at the added features and security and discuss whether such trade-offs are worth the reduction in performance. For example, to make the user's data much more secure, Apple puts a lot of mechanisms behind XPC, which is inherently slower than mere API calls. These slow the system. Are they worth it, for the security benefit? That's the productive discussion we should be having.