I have a Nexus 5X that was 2 years old late last year. At that time I git it's last major OS upgrade. (It will continue to get security updates for another year or so.) This is as good as it gets in the Android world.
It was hobbled at the outset with 2GB RAM. At introduction performance was adequate. It has degraded since then. There are times when I exit an app and it takes several seconds before the home screen is populated. Navigation normally runs in the background but if I open a different app, it may get bumped and disappears from notifications. I listen to podcasts frequently and its background process (the part that keeps audio going if I open other apps) gets bumped.
These are not related to processor horsepower but I believe are symptoms of insufficient RAM. It could also result from additional installed applications, but I have uninstalled more than I have added and it seems not to improve.
I had a 5X that I recently replaced due to the common boot loop failure.
Towards the end of its life its performance had degraded to the same point you experienced. Multiple seconds for the home screen to populate, camera lag, etc. It's crazy that a cell phone with 2GB of ram is incapable of running recent versions of Android with decent performance and even crazier when I'd open up a task manager and see mandatory things like Google Play Services consuming almost 60% of the ram on the device.
It was hobbled at the outset with 2GB RAM. At introduction performance was adequate. It has degraded since then. There are times when I exit an app and it takes several seconds before the home screen is populated. Navigation normally runs in the background but if I open a different app, it may get bumped and disappears from notifications. I listen to podcasts frequently and its background process (the part that keeps audio going if I open other apps) gets bumped.
These are not related to processor horsepower but I believe are symptoms of insufficient RAM. It could also result from additional installed applications, but I have uninstalled more than I have added and it seems not to improve.
Maybe it's time to look at third party ROMs.