My a51 was real sluggish with the OneUI 2.x, but I got the 3.0 update with Android 11 yesterday and I must say it's a night and day difference. Animations are smoother, it doesn't feel like I have to wait around to do everything
Good my variant is the SM-A515F (Panama), I am in with the firmware A515FXXU3ATC5 with security 2020-03-13. It is super fast and very stable, it does not have to be root, just apply disinfestation of garbage apk, through the ADB method, and the phone has shown very good behavior, getting 34 to 36 hours of battery, and in games this Super fast. I recommend you to update your official bases and remove garbage apk, with the ADB method.
I'm currently using Samsung Galaxy A51 with Feb 2020 Patch, performance is very sluggish and slow compared to other 6gb ram devices that I used last year, you can "Feel" the delay of animation from fingerprint, opening, and closing apps, I am totally disappointed with the performance of this device, hopefully Samsung can find a way to optimize its software with its hardware capability.
It's a little all over the place for me, but ultimately disappointing. I don't know if it's a problem with my device, but it seems like my phone just ****s the bed during random intervals. There are times when I'll be using my phone and it will be surprisingly smooth considering the hardware, and other times where the animations feel very choppy and unpleasant. I've been running a lot of AnTuTu benchmarks, and I've got scores up to 180,000 when it's doing good, and down to almost 130,000 when ****s going on. And that's not just AnTuTu, these are differences I can feel in normal operations. So it's weird. I'm not sure if it's some kind of hardware bug or I've got some background process eating away performance that I'm unaware of, or something else. It's a real shame, because there's a lot I love about this phone.
But that's my experience. For the record, I have the Latin American variant with 4gb of ram. I still have yet to get any updates on it. It seems I'm stuck with the December security patch (I'm not sure what's up with that).