Yeah, I get that. I've helped contribute to Pop!_OS in the past and thought I'd give it an early run. I'm just surprised that the packaged apps are so slow. When I ran them 6 months ago, they loaded so quickly I was shocked (<50ms).
I'm not sure if it's my system, or the (new) state of the apps.
I appreciate your question, but I think "we know" is problematic:
I'm not trolling, either, just asking questions from a philosophical point of view. I've changed my mind about several things I took very seriously and thought I was 100% right about. Could others be dealing with similar changing-mind-through-time processes? Could you?