Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.
I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while.
What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.
I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement.
