My 2006 Vista machine, with two cores at 2.6ghz quite simply multitasked better than my current ryzen 5 3600 based machine. The one simple reason why is that all the programs I ran on that machine were native, while all the apps we run nowadays are blobs of javascript in a dumb chrome window.

Eclipse ran better on my $600 laptop in 2012 than pycharm runs on my 6 core 2019 macbook. Also, on my macbook, high cpu activity causes constant pops in my audio, which is just a thing that happens with macbooks that people just ignore apparently.