I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.