Tor bandwidth and TTFB used to be universally very bad for me, no matter what I was doing.
Some time around ~2 years ago, though, the particular use-case of using Tor to (anonymously) access public-Internet websites got a lot better—both in bandwidth and TTFB.
Access to Tor hidden services is still slow, though.
Which makes me wonder: is the Tor network itself unilaterally faster now, and it's actually just the particular Tor hidden services which are all coincidentally bandwidth-starved?
Comparing apples to apples, DuckDuckGo's hidden-service gateway (https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/) still seems a lot worse-off than their clear-net website (https://duckduckgo.com/). And I would bet that they would scale their Tor gateway if they could. So maybe this is a limitation in how Tor handles routing to hidden services? Does a .onion have to route to one physical Tor node, rather than being capable of load-balancing among many?