How is that even possible, especially with modern hardware? Like you'd almost have to build the file explorer around like a sqlite-based message queue with a 1500ms poll interval to get performance characteristics like this. Absolutely insane feats of architecture astronautism are no doubt required for this to happen.
I was wondering how bad a sign it was when the decline in performance between Windows 95 and Windows 98 was detectable in many ways, but nobody was complaining because it was not always noticeable on PCs that were 3 years newer. You had to figure Microsoft developers had way better PCs than that, and didn't have any clue at all.
Turns out my suspicions were correct, it was the insidiously ignored ramp-up to exponential amounts of sluggishness as time marches on.
You know, like a snail without a shell :(
At least your description matches some the pain I get using NFS + lf.
Like the vanilla file explorer experience is way worse than anything I've come to expect with stuff like CIFS and SMB.
In that sense, when a terminal (running on a desktop environment) in Linux is faster than Windows Explorer, it's a shame. When a big file explorer like Dolphin drives circles around native file explorer of Windows, that's a big ole embarrassment.