On the other hand, a large part of the delay was due to the slow seek time of the magnetic hard drive (milliseconds). The CPUs only had one core, and RAM was both smaller and much slower. Modern SSDs make seek time negligible, ancient PassMark scores suggest a >10x improvement in single-core CPU performance, and there's been a >20x improvement in RAM transfer rate and a >40x improvement in RAM size. Residential internet bandwidth has seem something like a 100x improvement.
None of that hardware improvement seems visible in modern PCs, except for nicer graphics and (especially) higher-resolution displays. But comparing video games from ~2000 to video games today reveals just how small that graphical difference is in the OS/application space. MS Office was a lot more responsive in the early 2000s, too.
In the early days of Firefox, the developers bragged that every new release was smaller than the previous one. Maybe one day there will be a fad for more responsive software in general.