For comparison, Windows 2000 has a recommended minimum requirement of 64MB of ram. Windows 95 recommended 8MB. That's the scale of bloat we're talking about. That a modern UI which does essentially the same things can feel unresponsive in any way on several orders of magnitude more resources says a lot about the priorities of modern software developers.

The more computing resources we make available, the more wasteful we become: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

To be frank, that's because the Win 9x line was intentionally designed around the older, less-stable MS-DOS architecture. NT, which is what 2000 was based on, was around for seven years by that point and was remarkably stable. The big problem is that it was compatible with virtually nothing, and it wasn't until Win XP that the business world aligned itself with NT.

> I never installed anything else until XP was a ~requirement

Likewise. I only migrated to WXP because AoE3 required it… and it turned out to be terrible but there was no real way to downgrade.