For what's its worth macOS had excatly the same issue. My previous $WORK laptop was a HDD based model and all of a sudden after a macOS upgrade it was slow as h

For what's its worth macOS had excatly the same issue. My previous $WORK laptop was a HDD based model and all of a sudden after a macOS upgrade it was slow as heck. I can't recall the exact release but it was certainty very noticeable right after I applied a major upgrade. I was so happy when $WORK finally upgraded it to a SSD based model. I suspect OS developers pretty much target SSD machines and don't really bother to ensure there's no regressions on HDD machines. I also notice that Debian performs much better on SSD than HDD. So certainty not a Windows only issue.