It starts under 1s without modules. That is enough fast and still infinitely distant feature-wise of cmd.exe. You can make it go over 1m+ if you have a lot of m

It starts under 1s without modules. That is enough fast and still infinitely distant feature-wise of cmd.exe. You can make it go over 1m+ if you have a lot of modules to load, particularly with method of writing modules where you put functions into separate files (and no SSD) and/or some specific cmdlets in the profile. It can even be worst then that in particular environment - for instance within VSCode some of my scripts can take several minutes loading (while being otherwise instant). In other words, you can balance your environment for speed vs features. I believe Pwsh will get considerably faster in the future given that optimizing it will pay out on nano server which currently boots faster then PowerShell is loaded in it afterwards (which rly sux).