It does depend a lot on the software and I don't get why zoom is falling behind here. I'm dealing with this problem a lot on a recent Intel MBP and in my experience:
Hot jet engine: Meet on Firefox, slack video, zoom.
Works well: meet on Chrome, AWS chime, pop.
Is totally on MBP for being an odd one, but also on the software since we have counterexamples of good performance.
I do my Zoom calls happily with by 2013 MBP 15”. But I haven’t upgraded macOS for 3 years, partially because BigSur dropped support for these macbooks.
Might it happen that more recent versions of macOS are extremely slower for Zoom? I’ve always thought they tune macOS for bigger L2 cache and it keeps paginating, but you’re telling me recent hardware is slower too.