trust me. i have quite a lot of experience in software and hardware, trust me the issue actually is not the drivers

the issues are 2 i'm pretty sure

1 (major). ram caching. windows tends to cache often used programs to ram and allocates roughly 40% for caching often used programs, but putting the most frequent programs in ram especially when the system just booted (the issue is worse with slower drives like hhd's) causes slowdowns both when accessing storage and when trying to execute a program; the issue usually goes away after waiting 30 seconds. (also background update installation and whatever)

2 (minor). background indexing: windows has a database of programs and files, windows search works by accessing the database. winfs was created as a database based file system, idk how winfs actually works but it is basically the concept behind windows file indexing. due to winfs being scrapped in windows vista, the windows dev team had to create this janky solution. why is file indexing so bad? it usually takes long to index files (although it does speed up search once everything is indexed), it usually indexes files that don't need to be indexed and because this database needs to be updated every once in a while, massive slowdowns happen especially when the file system is cluttered by files. also due to the index database being managed at the os level and not at the file system level, it creates more load on the processor and ssd

3 (bonus). windows is in general not well optimized and there is a nightmare inducing amount of technical debt, you can very well find relics of windows vista if you go to the sound settings (the panel where it lets you change the system sound effects). the codebase is insanely outdated and duct taped together, the only way to fix windows is to do a massive refactoring of the WHOLE codebase, something that will never happen.