When people bought a new W98 PC, which was often the first computer for so many consumers, it really did perform quite similarly to earlier-adopters' W95 PC's that were already in action.

The specs on the newer hardware were so much better which made up for it, and progressive sluggishness of Windows was swept under the rug for mainstream consumers, continuing to an extent today. You know, like a snail without a shell ;)

This is why in the '90's when Grove was running Intel and Gates was running Microsoft, professional geeks coined the phrase: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." They didn't wait until WindowsME to say this.

It wasn't really worth it for mainstream apps, but if you had a challenging Office 97 workload, with or without VBA, something like live "real-time" data acquisition, or god forbid any type of ML or simulation, the best improvement you could get was to wipe W98 off the HDD and start fresh with W95. It always has seemed like there was some uncalled-for obstacle to prevent easily installing a previous version of Windows on a new PC though.

Even now this still works to an extent, buy a new mainstream W11 consumer PC, install W10 in a regular ordinary Microsoft dual-boot configuration and see for yourself.

Most people would have so much SSD space left over they could even try a triple boot, how about that W10 ISO from 2015 if you really want to emphasize the difference in how much less sluggish things could have been now. Woo hoo. Plan to stay off the internet when booted to this one, in Device Manager you could even pre-emptively disable the ethernet & wifi.

Of course try it on a HDD if you haven't done that in a while, to see how that feels compared to earlier Windows when you were using nothing but HDDs.

Windows 8.0 is also still fairly installable in new PC's if you want to see what it was like when they had one of their many brilliant engineers taking focused responsibility to achieve faster boot times in particular.