I have a ThinkPad besides my main MacBook. I recently switched to KDE, a full desktop environment, and it is just insane how much faster everything renders than on macOS. And that's on a relatively underpowered integrated Ryzen GPU. Window dragging is butter smooth on a 120Hz screen, which I cannot say of macOS (though it outright terrible with the recent Electron issue).
Apple Silicon is awesome and was a game changer when it came out. Still very impressive that they have been able to keep the MacBook Air passively cooled since the first M1. But yeah, macOS is holding it back.
Modern machines are so insanely fast, the UI should almost react before you do an action.
My 5900X machine with relatively slow RAM running CachyOS actually almost feels as instant as DOS machines with incredible low latency.
Instead, we get tons of layers of abstraction (Electron etc), combined with endpoint security software in the enterprise world that bring any machine to its knees by inspecting every I/O action.
Zed is an awesome editor where every interaction is just “snappy”.
I feel all the animations and transitions have been introduced to macOS just to paper over slowness. I’ve disabled them via the accessibility settings which helps in perceived snappiness a bit, but it also makes yank visible where performance is not up to par.