Ask HN: What to do about Catalina's 'slow by design' problem?

'macOS Catalina: Slow by Design?' [1] was posted here 4 months ago. I don't understand all the ins and outs, I just know that since I upgraded to Catalina, my laptop has become painfully slow (and hot and loud) whenever I do web dev work. VS Code seems to really struggle with features like TypeScript Intellisense and save participants. And Next.js's dev server takes sometimes minutes to reload after small incremental changes.

Is there any fix for the performance issues on Catalina? Is Big Sur any better? Or is the only solution to downgrade to Mojave?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247