Version 1.6 (beta) is significantly faster (5-10x on my machine) than 1.5, largely due to code invalidations and parallelism. And 1.5 is faster (in both runtime and compiletime) than earlier versions.
I also imagine future iterations will focus on AOT options as well (we already have some in the form of PackageCompiler.jl),
Yes, absolutely. Version 1.5 brought significantly faster precompilation and version 1.6 (currently in beta) brings some precompilation speed improvements on top of that as well as multithreaded precompilation, so things have improved a ton in that regard.
We're expecting more benefits down the pipe as well with better AOT compilation support so you don't have to redo compilation so much between sessions.
Compilation and precompilation latency have been the two most consistent focuses of the developer team over the past couple years.
I also imagine future iterations will focus on AOT options as well (we already have some in the form of PackageCompiler.jl),