Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.