Various UX and perf improvements. Additional benchmarks

[emilevr]

Describe your changes

• UX improvements for MacOS
• Some performance improvements
• Some arena changes
• Some workflow improvements

PR requirements

• I have followed the guidelines in the Contribution Guide document.
• I have checked that there aren't other open Pull Requests for the same update/change.
• I have confirmed locally that there are no linting issues.
• I have confirmed that all tests pass locally.
• I have confirmed that my changes do not negatively impact performance by manually comparing before and
• I have confirmed that code coverage has not regressed as a result of my changes.