I'm not convinced by your argument because the examples you cite of things having improved since these times have hardly anything to do with having a text inter

I'm not convinced by your argument because the examples you cite of things having improved since these times have hardly anything to do with having a text interface feeling sluggish. There's no contradiction here, you could have the best of both world (and if you eschew web technologies you generally get that nowadays). Are these modern Electron apps chugging along using multi-GB of RAM and perceptible user input latency because they're auto-configuring my printer in the background? Can twitter.com justify making me wait several seconds while it's loading literally megabytes of assets to display a ~100byte text message because it's auto-configuring my graphic card IRQ for me? No, these apps are bloated because of they're easier to program that way. Justifying that using user convenience is a dishonest cop-out. If you rewrote these apps with native, moderately optimized code there's nothing that would make them less user-friendly. On the other hand they'd use an order of magnitude less RAM and would probably be a few orders of magnitude faster. It's fine to say that developer time is precious and it's fine to do it that way but justifying it citing printer drivers of all things is just absurd.