> so slow it feels like a malicious prank

Windows Explorer -> Sort by date

Unfathomable how someone thought that was a good idea.

What do you mean? I sort by (reverse) date almost everywhere where I look at files.

The "date" column and sort order in Explorer is a "deep state metadata inspection" kind of deal. For ordinary files this makes no difference, it's the same as Date modified, but sorting by date in a folder full of media files generally ends badly and in any case takes a long, long time until Explorer has parsed every last one of them. Explorer also seems to be rather unable to cache the results of this operation.

I am on Linux and I had to use updatedb recently and I thought, this crap is so damn slow I want to use Everything again.