It feels to me that perhaps your expectations of 5G are the peak/headline speeds that have been produced in testing, rather than what that translates to when it gets deployed in the real world with constraints on owned/deployed spectrum and potential hundreds/thousands of simultaneous users with differing devices of different specifications.
While the 5G headline speeds are great to highlight the possibilities, they certainly won't be what are seen widely when the user-base with 5G capable devices increases (arguably the 5G network should become more dense at the same too, balancing that somewhat).
Similar to what we see with 4G today - headline speeds are multi-hundred, but in some places its single digits!
Something like this sees this play out in the real world:
RootMetrics has today published a new study of 5G based mobile broadband speeds and latency, which compares the network and coverage from EE (BT), Vodafone, Thr
www.ispreview.co.uk
And this is an article from April 2016 for 4G:
UK’s LTE coverage only 53 percent, way behind massive countries like China and US.
arstechnica.com
Three has managed to boost its average 4G LTE download speed from 12Mbps to 18.7Mbps—a statistical tie with EE, which is sitting on 17.8Mbps. This is almost certainly due to Three ploughing more spectrum into its LTE network in the back half of 2015. Vodafone and O2 share a distant third place at around 12Mbps.
Compared to the Oct 2020 OpenSignal results
Read the United Kingdom, October 2020, Mobile Network Experience for in-depth analysis into mobile network performance. Discover more insights with the Opensignal app.
www.opensignal.com
Download speed (4G):
O2: 18.2
Voda: 22.4
Three: 22.2
EE: 36.4
It doesn't seem like they've come very far (other than EE), but considering the growth of devices, data usage, increase of various cloud-based services the providers are keeping up with and delivering beyond the usage increases (overall). Though as ever, there are caveats - there will be certain sites/locations that don't progress/change and so appear to have got slower.