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!

I keep harping on Visual Studio, but I learned programming with Borland Turbo Pascal (and later Turbo C/C++) on a 4.77MHz machine with 512k memory. It was orders of magnitude more responsive than VS on my current 16 core 3.5GHz 128GB machine.

The only exceptions are: 1) the actual build, which is faster on the modern machine, but only for a large number of source files and 2) reading and writing files - a floppy disk cannot beat an nvme drive of course.

It was also doing about 3 magnitudes less work