People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.
Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower.
Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much software fail on stuff like disabling a button when you have clicked it and the computer is working.
MacOS is on a steady curve to the bottom. It is not alone.
The software bloat and decreasing quality is a serious issue.
Latency when the system is under low load was definitely better, although a big contributor to that is changes in input and display hardware. But otherwise I'd much rather have today's "bloated" experience over the real world of the '90s.
If you take software from 20 years ago, and run it on modern hardware, it will be instant in most operations.
macOS icons also used to have distinct silhouettes which made them easier to distinguish, but now everything is a square tile. Screen controls which used to be visible and targetable are now hidden and are harder to hit when they do appear.
It feels like we are still under the tyranny of the (Jony Ivian?) streamlined aesthetic over usability and functionality, as if a library decided to organize books by size and color.
In the case of Apple, it's often Apple software eating up the benefits of Apple hardware.
Unfortunately subtle differences (such as improved reliability/security or a streamlined workflow) are lost in the computing market, where people are attracted to the new and shiny rather than the old and usable. Also designers like to mess with things.
And yet Electron apps often garnish that memory bloat and computational inefficiency with sluggish performance and a clunky user experience.
It's a shame when an 8GB Mac mini doesn't have enough RAM to run apps comfortably. Of course there's a bit of a corrupt bargain going on between bloated software and Apple since the latter wants to upsell you to a more expensive model.
