Are you aware at all that the last was a major update, in the sense that the entire display environment was changed to KDE Plasma 6? Are you also aware that this update likely needed additional preparation from you?
The respective information was noted in the usual Update Announcement. It does seem many simply ignore those (generally), however, the importance cannot be understated. Many people have claimed ignorance and the focus suddenly switched to ‘how do I recover from this’.
If you search the forum now you should find related posts. Some people have had success by removing foreign (and no longer supported) widgets and other software, logging out and deleting the ~/.cache from a TTY; manually cleaning any remnants of old widgets etc that may exist under ~/.config, and finally rebooting. Most of this should actually have been done prior to updating; especially for those with heavily modified environments. This post of mine, and several others in the 2024-05-13 Stable Update announcement might be helpful.
This may well be the main contributor (and possibly the cure) to your apparent sluggishness.
I hope this helps. Cheers.