I work at a BigCorp that ships desktop software (but none of the above products) and network latency is (usually) pretty easy to extract out of the boot critical path. Blocking UI with network calls is a big no-no, and I expect any sizeable organization to have similar guidelines.

Work like in the OP's article is probably the most difficult - it's work that is necessary, cannot be deferred, but is still slow. So it requires an expert to dig into it.

Power Designer surely is phoning home but this isn't nearly slow enough to matter here. AFAIK Visual Studio phones in during the operation, and not on startup. Libre Office almost certainly isn't phoning anywhere.

I didn't include the slowest starting software that I know, Oracle SQL Developer, because it's clear that all the slowness is caused by phoning home, several times for some reason. But that's not the case for all of them.

EDIT: Or, maybe it's useful to put it another way. The slowest region on the world for me to ping is around Eastern Asia and Australia. Some times, I get around 1.5s round trip time for there. A minute has around 40 of those.

Network lag can be worked around with concurrent programming techniques--you don't even have to use a high-performance language to do it. The problem is that concurrent programming is far beyond what the typical Jira jockey can do--bosses would rather hire commodity drones who'll put up with Agile than put up with and pay for the kind of engineers who can write concurrent or parallel programs.

I use Visual Studio on an air-gapped machine with no (active) network cards (so Windows / winsock2 knows there is nothing that can respond and any connection should error out immediately) and it still takes almost a minute.

At least VS is just kinda slow, maybe it's the XML parser :D

The answers in this subthread had me think more: I am using a company provided Windows machine and a Linux virtual desktop for the same tasks. Startup times difference for many applications is night and day. Probably due to virus scan and MS OneDrive.