Was that with or without a bootloader? My understanding was EFI was marginally faster to initialize (which might not be true based on what you're saying) but yo

Was that with or without a bootloader? My understanding was EFI was marginally faster to initialize (which might not be true based on what you're saying) but you could also skip the bootloader and load the kernel directly (EFISTUB) which would also eliminate initram (which seems fine assuming you're using vanilla VMs on popular hypervisors/providers)