This isn't my experience. I just went to a Computer museum and they had a TRS-80 from the 1980s. The keyboard latency was incredibly low, and text editing (typing programs in Basic) felt a lot more responsive than using Google Docs, Microsoft Word 365 or a modern IDE.
A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers.
But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.
A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers.
But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.