I haven't had hardware with a spinning disk in active use in years, so my experience might be coloured by the improved performance from SSDs and may thus be irr

I haven't had hardware with a spinning disk in active use in years, so my experience might be coloured by the improved performance from SSDs and may thus be irrelevant to whether things are too slow with a HDD, but that's how I also see it. Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that. It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.