Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.
I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.
The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.
I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.
Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.
Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.