What is weird to me is that apparently there has not been someone in a position of power in this project that would go "Wait guys, this is not good. Any other ideas? How can we improve?"

No, just roll on with it.

There was a period of time, around 2010-2015 when I really felt that computers were fast. SSDs were getting more affordable and that was a huge improvement, every action was immediately responsive. In 2020, that has somehow been undone. It takes 5 seconds to launch a calculator. Software guys really like to undo all the advances that the hardware guys are doing.