depending on your network, `npx create-react-app --template typescript` might take 10-15 minutes easily.

Well, yes, given an infinitely slow network any action depending on the network can take an infinite amount of time.

Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.

but isn't it? We've moved a ton of the compute to using the network and I think that makes things a lot slower than they need to be... and a lot less optimized. And along with that, since we have essentially infinite storage we havne't gotten good at trimming the fat... this is yet another thing that steals from our compute.