It just hasn't gotten better.

Fundamentally, whenever latency gets too bad, developers fix it. But often not until then. So it always just kind of sits there at the edge of just-barely-tolerable. Which is defined by human behavior, not chip speed or similar.

I remember iTunes in the 2000's taking several seconds to respond to user actions. I remember using software like PageMaker in the 1980's that would take forever to respond. Lotus Notes in the 1990's was horrible. Running antivirus would slow your system to a crawl. Other stuff from the 2000's -- Acrobat Reader, or Outlook.

It's always been an issue with apps on the computer.