I have the 2019 16-inch i9 MBP for work, and even that has served me pretty well for almost 2.5 years. I'm fairly conscious about what I have running at any given time, I force-quit out of apps that I only open occasionally to free up resources. Sometimes the fans will get going quick if I'm doing a lot (running Java services, in a Teams call, etc - on top of whatever the hell processes are being used by jamf, VPN, and zscaler) but I can't recall it ever "slowing to a crawl." It mainly just gets hot until I'm done with one of the big tasks the laptop is currently doing.

So the issue is the corporate mandated malware. I usually lay the blame of performance issues on corporate malware for any modern Mac or Windows PC.

But all video conferencing software sucks. I have to use them all on occasion depending on the client and usually the only one I actually keep installed instead of using the web version is Chime (yeah I know how do you say where you work without saying where you work).

Oh I just notice you said you had an x86 Mac, yeah they all suck when it comes to fan noise and throttling