Everything else is even worse

Is it at all possible he has an Intel Mac from 2018 that he hasn't been able to upgrade yet, likely due to insane cost?

Because that's my thing

I had a 13 Pro and I thought it was too out-dated which was why my Safari was ridiculously slow, so I bought the 16 Pro...noticed literally zero improvement. Overheats, bugs galore, search for apps is slow and still doesn't work.

I am seriously looking at Android now, first time in my life.

Person probably issued Apple laptops from work, which, funny enough is probably why they get performance issues, as work is going to drop in the usual CPU killing anti-virus and other corporate tooling.

Even without buying Apple, many jobs issue mandatory MacBooks. I can understand the frustration of having to deal with these. In my case, it's mostly the window management aspect of MacOS that infuriates me. I even spent $30 of my own money to buy uBar to make it a bit more usable. But uBar itself is buggy so it's not a perfect solution.