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.