before native compilation Emacs itself was pretty dang slow on its own, and you probably have to compile yourself to get nativecomp (which won't always be true) depending on the distro you're using etc
That is completely wrong. I'm using Emacs back since when I was compiling it on 486 with 8 MB of RAM. nativecomp is the single biggest speed boost I saw Emacs ever getting. Using Emacs on the same machine with nativecomp on or not was night and day (a Core i7-6700 in my case: maybe the difference would be less noticeable nowadays but I couldn't tell as I now only ever run nativecomp and compile it with nativecomp on).
You're the first person I ever hear saying nativecomp doesn't make a difference.
I compile Emacs from source specifically to get nativecomp because of the obviously perceptible difference in performance. Maybe you have a much faster computer than the rest of us?