

TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.
AI generally doesn’t obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn’t scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It’s just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn’t waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.
Pixel 9a has some issues with performance, currently. They used older storage tech for the 9 and 9a than other devices and not enough memory for all the “AI” features that are tracking everything you do to make things more convenient. There are a few articles out there related to some ways to improve performance a bit by disabling some background apps that you may not be using. It’s also possible future updates from google may fix some of whatever is causing the issues for many users.
But it’s not an endemic Android issue, at least not modern versions in my experience. I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 Pro currently and just grabbed a couple of 10+ GB zip files I had on an old dropbox account and unzipped them with the fossify file manager. It was basically instant. Took longer to download them than unzip.
As I mentioned, your best bet is to use ADB or similar and monitor what applications are eating up resources and try to free some up. Especially any apps thrashing the storage or filling memory. That’s assuming you have already uninstalled any bloatware and rebooted recently to make sure no bad apps are stuck.