I never felt the UI responsive difference between Linux and MacOS but Windows (including freshly installed on powerful many-core machines when) is a different story. The number one reason I ever switched from Windows to Linux is the latter always feeling way more swift - UI responsiveness always remaining perfect and some background tasks also working much faster. And I never actually used lightweight WMs - only KDE, GNOME and XFCE. The first time I've noticed some slowness in Lunux was on RaspberryPI (4, with the default LXDE).