Fresh is "fresh but with IntelliJ and a large project open", but without all the background NGINX etc installed.

Once one app starts lagging, they all lag. Terminal, TextEdit, Safari, Notes, IntelliJ, everything.

I'm well north of 130wpm, but I don't think that matters for the issues that my Macs have had to deal with, as I used to be well below 130wpm and still experienced such issues.

IntelliJ: Thats your problem.

Everytime i tried to run their IDE's on mac os i gave up because the abysmal typing/scroll performance.

I think textmate broke my brain back in the day, can't stand any editor that can't run at 60fps. (unless it's vim/nano on ssh)

Hmmm.. I run IntellJ IDEA on my 2013 MBP and I don't experience system-wide text-entry latency. Though, to be fair my version of IDEA is pretty old (2016.2)

We have hundreds of engineers at work who all use the same apps on latest MacBook Pros.

There have been zero reports of widespread lagging which clearly indicates that there is some problem with your setup. IntelliJ is the likely candidate especially if you are doing Scala or Kotlin development.

I've got the same issue, I'm a relatively slow typer (90WPM) but every now and then the Mac just becomes so slow and typing everywhere is lagged. It usually happens when I'm working on the frontend of our app which has a javascript 3D engine in it, and the editor is visual studio code, so I was just assuming it was some weird Blink engine problem.

How did you increase your typing speed so much? I’m sitting at around 70ish wpm and would like to increase it

For me, chatting online for hours on end since ~1997. My impatience to get a message out naturally resulted in typing faster.. I also played piano since childhood which I'm sure helped.

Lots of slowly accumulated, deliberate practice here and there over many years. monkeytype.com is probably the best site for typing right now. And I just destroyed so many of bits of anonymity haha.