For me the most common cause of sluggishness and beach balls was having Microsoft Teams running at the same time as a Time Machine backup while a Western Digita

For me the most common cause of sluggishness and beach balls was having Microsoft Teams running at the same time as a Time Machine backup while a Western Digital Elements USB drive is attached (easily verified by quitting Teams, stopping the Time Machine backup, or unplugging the WD Elements). It’s easy to point the finger some times, especially when one is biased against a particular vendor or technology. If it was disk access by the anti-malware software that triggered my slowdowns, I’d probably be pointing the finger at that anti-malware rather than the MacBook Air M1’s issues with sleeping USB disks or Teams’ penchant for gobbling up all available RAM.