I use the latest versions with native compilation and gave up on terminals and curses codes in favor of plain M-x shells. I tend to accumulate hundreds of buffers, some of them GB size, and all is super snappy. I am very sensitive to latency and can’t stand slow pings, avoid wireless for that reason, and have tuned my keyboards over the years to reduce input latency and errors. Emacs out of the box is super fast. The plain text input loop is in microseconds so not perceptible. And there is hardly ever a need for terminal emulators but when there absolutely is (say htop) then you can use vterm.