Why is Android so slow?

It's a device running Android on a bottom-of-the-range SoC with, according to the description, 5 out of "9" gigabytes of "RAM" running from swap space on the internal storage.

Perhaps Doogee could've ported Android better, but I don't think Android will ever run smoothly on this device.

Android contains a lot of tricks to cache as much as possible in RAM so things like sleep/wakeup and app launching can be very fast. You can see the device take a while to launch a terminal on Debian, that's exactly the kind of thing Android uses all of its RAM for to prevent.