Beachball of death every few seconds

The first thing that stands out is Chrome. It is well known that it and its keystone minions thrash video applications by hogging the system videotoolbox.

See https://chromeisbad for an explanation of what they and how to delete them.

Then delete FCP and download a fresh copy from the App Store.

Try uninstalling Freespace. As per the report, this is using a lot of CPU. What is the purpose of continuously assessing the free space on your drives, anyway?

There are also a lot of other stuff installed, some of it appears to be old and migrated from previous macs.

This can cause issues.

It is usually been better to only migrate the user accounts when setting up a new mac, and this is even more so coming from an Intel to an Apple Silicon mac.

Please post an EtreCheck report https://etrecheck.com giving the application Full Disk Access in Privacy System Preferences. Copy the report and use the Add Text button to paste the result into reply box. 

It is possible.

Some people use only one library for everything, and this can lead to a huge library - especially if you also copy the media to the library. Huge libraries cause the application to slow down, and also if the library somehow gets corrupted you can lose your edits.

I do one library per production. In addition, I prefer to organize media in folders in the Finder, and importing using "Leave in Place". Thus libraries are extremely small, and if I have a problem it will not affect all the other edits.

Does the same happen if you create a new library, add a few clips, and make a test project?

Does the same happen if you create a new admin account, login as that user and make a test library and project?

saamvisual wrote:

You are a helpful person - I hope you are compensated for being so good to strangers!

Is it simply a matter of deleting apps from the application folder if I want to uninstall them?

That depends on the application.

With Chrome, it is certainly NOT enough to drag it to the trash: these keystone daemons will continue to run in the background if you delete Chrome.

Again: follow the directions in the link I pointed to. If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask.

After that, delete FCP and download a fresh copy from the App Store.

That should help.

Once you get rid of Chrome, post a new Etrecheck report so we can make sure that it's completely gone.