It is no myth. Go try a Windows 2000 system and compare it to today. Windows 2000 will respond a lot faster (often instant), even on complex applications.
And my main rig is a Dell T7920 running Win11 Pro for Workstations 24h2, with a Gen4 TLC NVMe directly attached to the Gen3 PCIe bus (at 7,000/6,900Mbps it can totally saturate its channel), 256Gb of 3200Mhz DDR4 LRDIMMs (4×32Gb), and dual 8C/16T Intel Silver 4110 CPUs.
By any measure, my current rig should have blown the Win2k machine out of the water. The Win2k machine did the file operations in HALF THE F**KING TIME