[blaenk]

You should try profiling to see if anything comes out as taking up a lot of resources. `M-x profiler-start`, do some work or type some stuff (if you notice that it's slow), then do `M-x profiler-report` to see if anything in particular is slowing things down. Note though that the part where you type `M-x profiler-report` may sometimes show up in the profiler so ignore that.

See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Pr...

It's true that emacs can get pretty slow if you have so many things running that you don't even need. It's also useful to defer packages until you actually need them by using autoloads or if you use use-package, `:defer/:commands/:bind` which create them for you.