Oh I'm with you. There used to be (though I haven't been able to find any lately) Tor web gateways that would let you visit a tor site without having to run Tor or Tor Browser yourself. They don't protect your identity when you use them the way using Tor Browser protects your identity, but they could be used. And some onion sites still come up as results when you search DDG for something like "Hidden Wiki site:onion.pet". The result doesn't link you to the .onion address, but to a .onion.pet address that takes you to the same page/site.

As far as Tor and speeds, I think Tor imposes very large latencies (that is, it takes a few seconds to get a download started), which is more what you're experiencing when you notice sites "being slow" when browsing through Tor. But bandwidth isn't affected all that much.

One caveat, though. When downloading through Tor, your request is being proxied through a chain of proxies. If any one of those is slow or purposefully limits speeds, that will limit your bandwidth. That's a problem, maybe 30% of the time or so. But there are commands you can use to tell Tor to "please select a different route." After doing that once or twice, you'll generally get a decently fast "circuit."

Just as a test, I downloaded the latest Arch Linux ISO (which is 853MB in size) from here both via Tor and directly. Direct took 7 minutes 36.324 seconds for an average speed of 1.869MB/s. Tor took 9 minutes 26.627 seconds for an average speed of 1.505MB/s. In short, a pretty moderate difference in speed.

And, yes, this is a highly unscientific, n=1 test, but I think it's pretty well in line with what I've seen in the past.