Lots of spinning beachballs and tremendous lag

I'm experiencing a lot of lag as I work, and spinning beachballs, as of a couple weeks ago. I have a good deal of RAM but that doesn't seem to be the issue because that beach ball is spinning even if only one of my apps is open.

I'm a graphic designer in the print industry, so I'm not using a lot of high-intensity video type software. I used Adobe InDesign and Illustrator every day, Photoshop mostly for converting the colorspace and minor photo adjustments. Sometimes the beachball appears just because I clicked an insertion point to type something, just very, very simple stuff like that.

Periodically, I will go through my fonts and turn a lot of them off (Font Explorer X Pro), so I don't think that's the issue. I know fonts can cause a lot of problems, so I'm always keeping an eye on them.

I have needed to upgrade my system for quite some time, so I thought I would do it in case this was a contributing factor to the slowness. So over this past weekend I upgraded to the OS Monterey. Everything is still behaving the same way.

It's really slowing me down in getting work done. I have not run into this literally in YEARS. I'll attach the EtreCheck report, and by the way, I have an outside party do a backup for me every morning.