Chrome is Bad:
Short story: Google Chrome installs something called Keystone on your computer, which nefariously hides itself from Activity Monitor and makes your whole computer slow even when Chrome isn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone makes your computer way, way faster, all the time.
Long story: I noticed my brand new 16" MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed *nothing* from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use <10% normally).
Very interesting. I’ve been dealing with random lag issues (apps taking a long time to start up, laggy scrolling in web browsers, etc.) on my 16" MacBook Pro ever since I got it. Chrome is the web browser I use for work stuff, and I never considered that it could be the root cause of my MacBook Pro’s performance issues. Today, I followed the instructions and got rid of Chrome and its associated configuration files. I also downloaded the latest version of Brave, and will be using that for work instead since it supports the various Chrome extensions I need. I’ll report back in a few weeks (hopefully with good news)!
Update (A few hours later…): No more issues. I guess it was Chrome after all.