Firefox performance is better with GPU disabled (on Xorg with noaccel), to reduce RAM bandwidth requirements. Which leaves out most of the fancy wayland compositors.
Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.
I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience.
I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off.
Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.