MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.

Yup. Ubuntu 20 is the first desktop linux OS that just worked. Every other Linux desktop before it has had suspend/resume issues, wifi issues, sound issues, 3d issues, ratchet settings (things that can be set but never unset without some arcane magic), weird desktop behaviors, buggy software that crashes all the time, etc etc. Yes, I've tried ALL of them, including pop os and deepin.

This year marks the first year that I can just use linux without having to debug it.

These things are highly hardware-dependent. Typically it takes a few years until support for new hardware devices, features or platforms stabilizes. But it can even take way more than that, and some less common and lower-quality hardware may fail to get support altogether.