Yes! It's frustrating. I have a perfectly good 2015 MBP 13" that runs as fast as the day I bought it but is now unusable for much of the web, especially video or high Javascript situations. To use YouTube without it being a jetengine you need to force YouTube to return you mp4s instead of vp8 or whatever they use now. Twitch is just unusable is chat moves slightly faster than not at all. Everything in general is a frustrating sluggish mess. My phone is going the same way as well, becoming less and less usable.
But it's not the laptop or phone that's changed, it's the rising tide of tech enthusiasts constantly buying new computers, having their performance QC be "feels OK to me", and that raising everyone's minimum spec.
The worst offender imo is VScode. it won't run smoothly on my 2010 era Thinkpad. yeah it's old, but we're talking about a text editor here. without any plugins it should still be able to do at least that much smoothly.
I don't need AAA games to run on it, but text editing!
I am forced to use VSCode because some disability plugin[1] I use only (for now!) exists for it, but having to switch to it over SublimeText + Vim was annoying. If you don't need to use it definitely try either of those options
I want an ·easy· button for vim. I want to upgrade to a new version, be given new decoration and a new colorscheme to be angry over. but then I want it to have all the modern features. LLM code-complete that i can choose to pay a monthly SaaS for, a bevy of plugins like one to help me program my esp32 for my little iot project, super special handling for language-of-the-month.
But it's not the laptop or phone that's changed, it's the rising tide of tech enthusiasts constantly buying new computers, having their performance QC be "feels OK to me", and that raising everyone's minimum spec.