I do run Emacs in GUI mode and it's embarrassingly slow due to various factors I gradually managed to pinpoint:

1. 5K retina display (other Mac owners seem to share the experience)

2. A font with a lot of graphemes (those without emoji seem to render faster)

3. The synchronous nature of LSP; I still don't get it why LSP can't work asynchronously in Emacs -- it does in VIM.

Hence me asking about terminal mode where it also works rather confusingly to me (I mean the colors).

> (macOS + inside terminal) isn't a common workflow for emacs contributors

As a guy who worked on OSS before -- and wants to do it again -- I am never feeling entitled to other people's work. I just wonder why those scenarios are supported in the first place (if no contributors are interested in making them work well).

> as a beginner to an ecosystem, if you are going to be opinioniated about having an unusual workflow, you are always going to run into problems

Fair enough and I don't think it's a bitter pill at all, I appreciate the feedback. But again, I am wondering why the supposedly first-class option (GUI) is also having problems. :(

> 2. people who want that workflow who care about having 24 bit colors didn't bother to file a bug report (did you?)

I wouldn't even know where to begin. The whole community and ecosystem seem extremely foreign to me and I never even got as far as to find a bug report template (admittedly I didn't try very hard). There's just something... alienating about this community, especially Emacs devs. Maybe I am wrong, I hope I am wrong but, just an accumulated feeling.

In any case, the reason I am getting a bit ticked off is that Emacs is supposedly hugely popular. I'd expect a 5K screen and some richer fonts to not trip it but perhaps you're right that macOS isn't a focus.