There's another difference which is a stretch of time in which personal computers got faster a lot faster - often faster than than bloat could catch up (for a b

There's another difference which is a stretch of time in which personal computers got faster a lot faster - often faster than than bloat could catch up (for a bit). That produced periods in which some previously slow-seeming software got quite snappy. This naturally stopped happening with the same regularity but it still does, occasionally - e.g. the excitement over M-series Macs.