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It sounds like you have a problem with your server.

Akeeba Backup 8 no longer loads JavaScript blocking, it loads it deferred. This means that your browser waits until the DOM is loaded before loading and running the JavaScript. On a decent server this is actually faster than the previous blocking loading of JavaScript. On a SLOW server, however, the page may take a very long time to load, especially if it has plenty of blocking JavaScript loading due to third party plugins. This means that every page of our component that uses a lot of JS (config wizard, configuration, backup etc) will appear to take a long time to load.

Regarding saving the configuration it does save. It posts a form like it's been doing since 2009. The way this page works hasn't changed in 12 years. If it returns instantly the problem is that something doesn't quite run correctly on your browser. Try clearing the browser cache.

The log page hasn't changed at all. It has always been slow since it asks the browser to render a massive document.

The Configuration page only spawns one process, the one rendering the Joomla request. Everything else happens client-side, with JavaScript.

The Configuration Wizard also only spawns one process at a time, for the original page load and each AJAX request.

Both pages have worked like that since 2009 and 2012 respectively. The only changes over the years has been the HTML structure the client-side JavaScript code generates since we went from custom CSS to Bootstrap 2 (when Joomla 3.0 was released) to our own custom CSS framework. The other change, made in version 7.0 which was released December 2019, was the removal of jQuery in favour of vanilla JavaScript code.

That said, 5 children per FPM process is low for a live host, especially if you keep the process pool small. The your site gets even moderately busy (we're talking about one request every 3 to 5 seconds) your PHP FPM process pool will be exhausted. Your web server will be waiting on PHP-FPM to free up a thread and handle the request. That's why everything is slow.

What you need to do is check if you have too many long running PHP processes. This would indicate that another extension is probably entering an infinite loop, meaning that thread is engaged until the PHP timeout kicks in. Do it a few times, combine with a small pool and you have the slow server syndrome. Another possibility would be a bot crawling / attacking your site BUT increasing the pool size would probably not help; the bot traffic would use up all resources. Well, at least the latter is something you can easily look for in the logs.