SLOW Application startup on new iMac

Follow the steps listed in: How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

The Safe Mode startup, and subsequent normal startup will take longer than normal.

How are you cleaning "caches?"

Boot into Recovery (Command R) and from the dropdown menu: Utilities>  Disk Utility> run the First Aid on your Macintosh HD (and the "Macintosh HD-Data" volume as well if Catalina) If errors are found and repaired, run again until no errors reported.

 Recovery: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

If no resolve—

To get a good look at your System config. for conflicts or issues, you can download/run this trusted utility https://etrecheck.com  

If you need help interpreting the report you can post it here in its entirety in the "Additional Text" box in the editing toolbar below, in your reply.

You can set its preference to "Allow full Disk Access",  with this you get a digest of issues from the last 7 days that are saved in your system.  _No_ personal information is revealed.

DrCry555 wrote:

Any thoughts on this? Does this mean that my hard drive is damaged? I really need some help because this is driving me crazy (and is taking up a lot of time just waiting for things to open!).

No— exit code 0 means no issues.

The volume /dev/rdisk2s1 appears to be OK

File system check exit code is 0

Restoring the original state found as mounted

What you are seeing is a bug in DiskUtility and local snapshots < FSroot tree references >

Uninstall all Anti-Virus, Cleaners, Optimizers, Speeder Uppers etc.

If you continue to have an issue—To get a good look at your System config. for conflicts or issues, you can download/run this trusted utility https://etrecheck.com  

If you need help interpreting the report you can post it here in its entirety in the "Additional Text" box in the editing toolbar below, in your reply.

You can set its preference to "Allow full Disk Access",  with this you get a digest of issues from the last 7 days that are saved in your system.  _No_ personal information is revealed.

A properly functioning drive should complete in ~ 3 minutes.  Marginal blocks that must be re-read multiple  times in order to get good data will add extra  run-time.

Try testing with no peripherals attached other then mouse and keyboard.

CleanMyMac is a big problem. It conflicts with self-cleaning routines that have been built into the Mac OS for about 20 years. It has to go. NO third-party products that claim to clean, tune up, optimize, or find you Mac a mate are needed and ALL will hurt performance.

I question whether you bought enough Mac for Logic and other pro apps. You have 8GB RAM in a sealed computer for which Apple won't do RAM upgrades, and upgrading is so hard some Apple Authorized Service Providers won't either. The extra labor doubles the cost of adding RAM.

I would have at minimum bought an iMac with the i5 processor option. From the MacTracker database:

The top bar is your entry-level i3. The middle bar is the i5, and the bottom the lovely i7. Big differences.

Those entry-level iMacs also come with a very slow mechanical hard drive. Your drive scores of 70-80MB/s are about as high as we see for that particular drive in current iMacs, but my wife has an entry level 21.5" 2011 iMac that is obsolete as heck and yet its drive still posts speeds in the 100-110MB/s range. They installed faster drives in entry-level models eight years ago than they do today!

Post another Etrecheck report after completed evicting CleanMyMac and we'll if that is helps.