I don't know, with 64GB 6000mhz RAM and Ryzen 9 7950X processor, things are instant for me on Windows 11, and even faster on Windows 10. Surely nobody runs on Windows on any lesser system?
Notice the lack of latency, notice how it flies and there's no delay on displaying the widgets and typing on a text editor or a word processor.
The Win95 Explorer is the last that doesn't have Internet Explorer embedded in it. It keeps the whole start menu in memory. Starting with Win98 (or was it Win95OSR2? - can't remebember) they added IE into everything. From then on, opening the start menu requires a disk read.
Also, you can't really experience the no-latency speed of Win95 if you use virtualization. You probably got used to Win7/10/11 latency so much, that even WinXP with virtualisation feels fast. Trust me: that isn't fast.
On XP, well, with the classic theme it can run pretty fast.
But I woudn't use propietary OSes today except for nostalgia experiments on secluded VM's.
I'm a linux home user, does Windows still do that slow-down-gradually thing?
Not in my experience. My installs go years without a reformat and reboots are usually only due to updates.