Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.

This is so frustrating. Though I recently come across a rare bread, that I thought stood out on load speed. The BBC of all places. While following the sub disaster I was pleasantly surprised at how quick it always loaded. Nearly always it would load near instant after clicking my bookmark. (Definitely not something that is that common when you live in NZ)

Not at all what I expected from a news site. They're usually full of crap and dog slow.

This is the specific URL I experienced this with. Though the whole site seems mostly very quick. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464

And this is on a 2017 MBP, which some sites are really slow. Nothing crazy like the new silicon CPUs here either.