Yeah, not as enthusiastic about OS X as I used to be, but I wish I had that kind of hardware in everything now.

Maybe it's my nostalgia/rose tinted glasses talking, but I recently used one of the old white plastic macbooks running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and was shocked at how instantaneous the user interface felt in comparison with Ventura on a modern machine. Even small details, such as opening/closing windows and typing text into TextEdit feels like it has lower delay/input lag on the old hardware/software.

Had a similar feeling while playing with an old iPod touch running the skeuomorphic/pre-flat iOS when compared with a modern iPhone.

That's the thing. Hardware keeps getting more and more powerful, but somehow the computers its in don't seem to be getting any faster. UI responses should be instantaneous by now. They used to be. Why aren't they? How many cores do these things have? Why is one of them not dedicated to catering to my impatience?

Sorry, that was getting a bit ranty.

It's the event-driven event-driven event-driven programming programming programming.

But my clicks are events. Why are they not given priority?

Snow Leopard was a high point for stability and speed. Unfortunately, changing expectations of integrations and feature demands meant they couldn't stay there.

What is rose-tinted is the OP's remembering the OSes of a few years ago being great. Mojave and Catalina had a bunch of annoyances and weren't as good at recovering from a bad install or a bad update push as Monterey and Ventura. Not that Monterey and Ventura are great either.

I recently decommissioned my iMac Pro and wiped its storage, which involved a High Sierra reinstall via Internet Recovery (http netboot).

It's amazing how snappy it is. I wish Apple would offer levers to turn off all the new (and laggy) features in their OSes for those of us who just want a computer to be simple and run apps.

I feel like Apple has forgotten what makes their Macs so successful, which is the seamless experience. I always wanted to own the latest one but not anymore, will stick with Linux.