Last game engine(C++) I worked on was a full hour to build if you touched a core header, and that was with Incredibuild that farmed out the compile across the studio.

If you care about compile/iteration times you can get them down to a reasonable level, Bevy does a good job splitting the heavy lift part into a section that is linked dynamically[1] which leads to pretty reasonable compile times even in something Rust based.

That said most of the high-churn areas I've seen drop to some scripting language(ex: Lua or others) for both hot-reload and avoiding compile times. Usually the heavy compute pieces are out in native with orchestration in scripting or something more flexible.

[1] https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/setup/#ena...