The common denominator there is browser tech & I think that will improve with time. And network-delivered services like Google Maps & Wikipedia are best compared to CD and DVD-ROM based services like MapPoint and Encarta, which had their own latency and capacity challenges.
In the meantime, you can still use tools like vim for low-latency typing. And it’s kind of interesting to see a Java GUI (IDEA) perform as well as it [has](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/).
Browser based apps are a shitshow though, but I figure that's mostly out of anyone's control. I chop that up to the browser being fundamentally a poor place for most applications, even ones that are tightly coupled to a server backend.
I bet at the time you barely noticed though.
I recently read a history of early NT development, and then installed NT4 in a VM to play with, choosing a FAT disk. It is /extremely/ responsive. Much more so than the host OS, Windows 10.
The NT4 and 95 shells were tight code. They were replaced a few years later by the more flexible "Active Desktop". This was less responsive.
In later releases, Windows started to incorporate background features, such as automatic file indexing. File indexing is IO intensive and hammers your CPU cache.
When I was regularly using NT4 (years ago), I had an impression that there was some overhead caused by registry searches. If this was ever a thing, improvements in raw computing power have conquered it.
If anyone else wants to try, NT4 and VC++ cost me next to nothing on amazon. For a good editor, get microemacs. Python2.3 works. (Don't let it near an open network.)
I know from experience, the most godlike PC you can possibly build does virtually nothing to make common applications less laggy.