What are you comparing against? VSCode with a ton of plugins to almost match IntelliJ? Because that's a lot slower than IntelliJ in my experience, not even close...

I am currently using IntelliJ heavily at work and I would agree it was too slow for a gigantic project we have... but there's literally no alternatives that work nearly as great (Eclipse, Emacs, VSCode, tried them all, they mostly can't even load a project like ours --- Eclipse can but it's a pain to index everything on re-builds)... but since I got a Mac M1 Pro, IntelliJ again feels light and snappy :D unfortunately, having the best hardware possible seems necessary now, as ever.