Proxmox VM Very Slow Performance

(This question seems to be off-topic for the ServerFault forum, but here goes...)

The Proxmox VE console will feel sluggish, yes. If you connect to the machine over RDP, does it feel better?

If you set the VM to perform server-like tasks rather than to act like a desktop OS, is its objective performance underwhelming compared to running a similar load on another hypervisor?

Remember that Proxmox is tuned for server use out of the box. If you want to run a desktop OS on it with anything resembling a desktop experience, I suggest reading up on tuning KVM on Debian.