Emacs has given me this feeling for a while. Even over a remote connection that is super slow, I am supremely confident in every keystroke getting to the server and doing what I want.

(Except for lsp/company which occasionally just messes up everything).

> I feel like things have felt pretty good in the PC world since NVMe SSDs and approximately Sandy Bridge.

Agree, and I would add that devs on some platforms have not been as thorough about using (or abusing?) all that new power. I've been able to continue use a Sandy Bridge laptop from 2011 - it'll turn 10 years old in a couple of months - because most apps on Linux still have so little complexity that you could run them on a computer from 2006. Electron-based stuff is not the norm. Adding an SSD a few years ago has been my only significant hardware upgrade.

Meanwhile, Macbook Pros that came out two years after my laptop was built can't even be updated to the latest version of macOS, before you even get to the issue of software jank.

Speed is a feature, said well: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

There are some hard usability limits that feel like the performance has stagnated or getting worse: when resizing Relayouting needs to be faster than the time for one frame (16ms usually). On Windows seemingly no software manages to do that.

Are nvmes noticeable over say a sata ssd