EtreCheck report is poor

Chrome and its minions are gobbling up a lot of your resources:

I noticed you have quite a few USB external drives running. What tasks are they doing? Several are obsolete USB 2 models. if you have them doing a lot of drive access as part of your workflow, your can make a "personal needs" run while waiting for them to finish tasks at 1/10th the speed of USB3.

The WD Passport is especially concerning. They were designed to go on sale very other weekend, not deliver long and robust service. The little 5400prm drives they usually hold are glacial. I've now seen two iMac reports here where disconnecting a USB2 Passport sped overall disk access by as much as 40%. It's easy enough to test by running with only the USB3 externals attached, or none.

Maybe you need to go Thunderbolt if the USB externals are your bottleneck.

I am sure that others will offer some useful comments but I have some thoughts to offer.

• You apparently have a lot of open apps. I suspect that you have them set up to open at startup. Having too many apps or windows open can slow down the computer.
• You have Malwarebytes installed and apparently it is running in the background. I would turn it off and occasionally run it manually or as needed.

Many times any of the following actions may be helpful. They are “maintenance” steps which are often ignored.

• It is important to occasionally restart a Mac. Ideally, once a week or more often. This does some system cleaning.
• Regularly clearing the history of your browsers can help as all the data is stored in RAM. Clearing frees up RAM for system use.
• If your computer is set to startup with too many apps that will slow down the startup process.
•  Some programs use a lot of RAM. (Like many Adobe apps and the Chrome browser.) When using them, close any other apps not being used.
• Doing a restart in the safe mode can clear a number of problems. This is done by holding down the Shift key at start up. This process can take up to ten minutes while the computer is doing its maintenance and cleans the cache. You may then restart normally.
• It is also a good idea to run the Disk Utility app. If it reports some issues, then rerun it repeatedly as needed until the final report is ok.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and enable you to speed up your computer.

“220 3rd party apps” + literally tons of external terabyte disks. Looks like abuse to me - it’s a wonder your Mac’s still running.

I concur 100% with Ronasara.

You can't keep loading on more stuff and then expect it to quickly go from point A to point B.

🤣