The pessimistic viewpoint is the hardware vendor would not mind if you felt your machine was slow and were motivated to upgrade to the latest model every year. The fact that they also control the OS means they have means, motive and opportunity to slow older models if their shareholders demanded.
Or they simply keep supporting old models with new versions of the OS, even though newer software versions are optimized, and contain new features, enabled by newer hardware improvements.
If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature.
What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.
The problem seems to be CPU bound, it's got 16GB of memory and memory pressure is low. The CPU is a i7-7820HQ, though I thought that it was interesting that my iPhone XR (Apple A12) scores higher on a synthetic benchmark than my top of the line MacBook Pro from the same time.
