I got very good news for you, we figured out the source of this problem: the jvm is running in client instead of server mode on Windows installations, which leads to the degraded performance.
We will ship a fix for this issue soon, but you can fix this issue yourself already today by editing the knime.ini.
To restore the performance on 4.4 you need to append server/jvm.dll to the vm definition in the knime.ini file:
-vm
plugins/org.knime.binary.jre.win32.x86_64_11.0.10.20210416/jre/bin/
So that it looks as follows:
-vm
plugins/org.knime.binary.jre.win32.x86_64_11.0.10.20210416/jre/bin/server/jvm.dll
best,
Gabriel