Most software I use feels more responsive than anything from the Windows 95 era.
[0] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10704
My biggest gripe lately is being forced to move more and more of my daily work off of a very fast and beefy local workstation to an AWS Workspace that feels like I'm time traveling backwards 20 years to a laggy remote desktop connection.
Can't you boot directly into a UEFI shell very, very quickly? Is this not equivalent to flipping a switch and jumping right into DOS?
Don't get me wrong. I agree with the sentiment and general message of your post, but it does seem like the goal posts have been moved.
I was at a vintage computer fest a few months back and got to play around on an old ~96 Pentium box running Win95. I was ASTOUNDED by how fast it was.
30 million line problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
Twitter and Visual Studio Rant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U
Seems more rose-tinted glasses than anything.
It took under three minutes to cold boot (~5 seconds from hibernation), took less than a second to load a static HTML page from the 2GB hard drive, and could play tanks.swf[0] for hours without spinning up the fan.
Compare that to modernity: your average Windows 10 machine will normally refuse to cold boot in favour of "fast startup" (basically hibernation) because it takes so long to start normally. If you try that anytime, good luck getting to "I can type with less than a second's lag between a keypress and the character appearing on the screen" in less than ten minutes. If you have an SSD, 16GB of RAM and an octacore processor, you might be able to get that down to 3 minutes – juuuust about edging out the "wait for it to boot, double-click on a document, and wait two seconds for Wordpad to open" of 1999 laptop hardware and software. (And if you give those resources² to Windows 98 it'll boot the whole OS and have your file open in less time than it takes Microsoft Teams to hide its splash screen.)
In a modern web browser, it usually takes less than a second to load a static HTML page. But sometimes it just takes upwards of 10 seconds, sitting there and spinning on a blank page with a blank address bar and (aside from the fan noise) no apparent sign of life.
And… well, good luck with tanks.swf these days; without active cooling, you can feel the temperature difference through the case. My laptop³ went up over 10°C with the fan. A simple Flash game where the majority of the gameplay is stationary graphics idles at half a core, averages one-and-a half cores and peaks at ~2.8 cores (70% CPU utilisation).
I think it's fair to say that computers have got worse.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/tanks_flashgame
¹: Yes, it would beep incessantly during the DOS phase of the boot sequence (BIOS beep, then a pause, then a faster, higher-pitched beep I can only assume came from WIN.COM), then proceed to try to delete all the files on the desktop once the desktop loaded. If you timed it right, though, you could tap the delete key before the first beep, and save yourself the hassle of waiting for the keyboard buffer to drain.
²: Minus the RAM, of course; that's enough to overflow its 32-bit address size and make its memory allocator think there's no RAM.
³: 4 (logical) core Intel i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz, with integrated GPU
Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – much faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then actually initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's still slow until the cache has warmed up.
It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can hear the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction.
It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion in JavaScript, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world.
It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".