I did (well nearly, started in 1984 on 8-bit home computers), and the only thing that was dramatically slower than today in normal day-to-day tasks was loading data from cassette tapes, floppy disks or via modem.
Since I've been on computers with hard discs (Amiga 3000 early to mid-90's) it's definitely true that responsiveness either hasn't improved much, or got even worse (I remember how confused I was when I first saw an application with a splash screen, to hide the long startup time). This sort of carelessness has been spreading like a plague since then.
That's true. Waiting to load a program from a Tandy cassette tape was a challenge. Floppy disks were a big jump forward.
Before that, the Big Jump for me was a move from a Hayes 300 baud modem to an AppleCat 1200. I clearly recall thinking "Woah! It's feeding data faster than I can read it!"
Next up was the BeOS. From cold boot to completely loaded desktop and hard drive light off in something like 15 seconds. (Meanwhile, Windows 95 took something like 2 minutes to boot up.)
The final quantum jump was about 6 years ago when I moved from a spinning to a solid state (SSD) hard drive. Again, big BIG boost.
I still remember adding a kind of splash/waiting screen to one email application because The Most Important Feature was executing too fast and users wouldn't feel that it really works. Sometimes latency is caused only by management.
That exists now on TaxCut software - when it says "checking your return for possible errors or red flags" or similar. It has some blinky lights animation or arrows or such that runs for about 10 seconds. It was probably done before Windows could bitblit the image to the screen.
Since I've been on computers with hard discs (Amiga 3000 early to mid-90's) it's definitely true that responsiveness either hasn't improved much, or got even worse (I remember how confused I was when I first saw an application with a splash screen, to hide the long startup time). This sort of carelessness has been spreading like a plague since then.