[mumblemumble]

It's really hard to tell. The configurability of emacs is both a blessing and a curse. Since you can customize basically anything, there are all sorts of opportunities for funky config or a weird extension to slow things down.

I know, for example, that a lot of people who have tried both report that Doom Emacs is much faster than Spacemacs. That implies to me that it's not evil mode. For my part (fairly vanilla Doom setup), I find holding j/k to scroll in Doom is snappier than IntelliJ, on the same computer.

But then, I've also heard people complain that it's just the opposite on Windows, where Doom emacs is apparently just really laggy.

That said, I agree that the "works for me" discussions aren't very fruitful, and I'm definitely not here to tell you which editor to use. More observing that, what with how... emacsy... emacs is, you're definitely not alone. It's entirely possible that the problem you had is both something specific to how you had things set up, and also absolutely not at all your fault.