The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
Tip: Spotlight searches through all data and can be slow, but there's a separate App Library search that only searches the app names and it's instant.
One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.
iOS and macOS aren't even close to the awfulness of search on Windows.
Although they have just rewritten it so there must have been some problems with it.