>> Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup

> If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure.

It is not out of the box though, is it? It sounds like the code that shows you the popup might not ship with stock Emacs.

Do you get the lag if you start Emacs with `emacs -Q`? Do you get it with Doom proper?

Switching Emacs distro sounds like doing a favor to a friend that kept stealing my money but I'll grant you that yes, I'm not using stock Doom and that might be the problem.

Can't promise I'll try again ever. I tinkered a good amount and lost faith. Nothing should need that much time and effort spent to have basic stuff working acceptably.

That's fair. The most important thing is that you get your work done.

Yep. NeoVim + LunarVim gives me that (as long as I don't update it often, lol, it has similar problems -- people over-excited to pimp it forever and ever).

I think people easily lose perspective. It's OK to love what you do and play with it but people swing too far in that direction and forget that others actually use their stuff and need to get work done with it.