I'm sorry, but we would be still using Color Macintoshes, Amigas and 486s if this was true. And Color Macs, Amigas and 486s are cool, but let's not pretend they would work flawlessly today, just counting the things we normally do on computers like watching videos at resolutions that would be considered ludicrous at the time, for example. And also the most popular consumer OS means the most targeted OS for all kinds of bad actors because of it's sheer user base, so yeah, a lot of those things makes Windows slow have to do with security, hackers didn't stop at the Chernobyl virus. Remember when Meltdown and Spectre needed patches that brought to its knees modern processors about 5 years ago? I surely do.
If you want to keep using a very old system out of necessity, I'm sorry, that sucks and I know for certain you would change that if you could. Fortunately there are a lot of good people out there who try to give breath to it just doing Windows debloats or Linux distros, but things move foward.
Where I've said there shouldn't be the progress? I've said, there's a lot of HW, that is completely viable.
I'm fed with the "security" argument. This is marketing BS to trick people into even more built-in data mining. There's no secure systems. And MS Windows, not the secure OS. And especially W11, which is a resouce hog, but it doesn't give any advantage. There's a lot of really dangerous blotware, that serves no good purpose. At this point they could make security patches for W7, as the windows core is still ancient, and it still would be more secure than W11. The Defender itself is a swiss cheese, that behaves as a Win32 troyan. It gives a lot of false-positives, while truly dangerous stuff can come in like no big deal. And Defender's Firewall only hampers the work of completely safe programs. There's no way to make Windows more secure, if MS made so many holes intentionally in the first place. Heck even Linux is not secure completely. Just don't go to malicious sites.
My point is, the MS Windows is infamous for inflating their specs out of no good reasons. As mentioned above, the core features, services and programs in Windows are still ancient, outdated and sometimes broken. The main thing tha being pushed as reason, is AI/Copilot. And how many people need that, or can opt-out? And that thing is another security loop-hole by it's own. Not only it gives complete access to all the user's data to MS and any thrird-party, but there's no clearness about how it's being used, and what it does itself. How such OS and devices can be treated as safe and "secure"?
The lack security is not only SW/HW problem, it's the behavioural issue. And it's big companies with valuable data, that are primary targets. And the companies should have everything backed up and decoupled from the internet access in the first place. And if they not...
And about HW. Those CPUs were taxed heavilly, in order to close the holes. So they ended up loosing that preformance "advantage" over older counterparts, in order to close the known security holes. Surely the more secure architecture and instructions sets should be present in CPU, and the HW overall must be up to date. But then again, for many stuff that people use, there shouldn't be a concern. And if the popular resourses like YT or social media like reddit, etc are not secure, then, there's nothing else much left to do. As these resourses should be giving only proven and tested data.
And neither UEFI, nor TPM, are anywhere more "secure" than lagacy BIOS, and give no real benefits. TPM is just the addition for the HDCP that intrudes to check if there's no pirated content. How that's needed, if people use official software and HW? And the pirates, will find their way, in any case.