Especially with the increase in storage performance - going from a hard disk that might have even still been using PIO modes to modern NVMe would be gigantic
> I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?
Implies you're compiling the 386 era versions of Linux - so the fact modern Linux is larger is immaterial.
The same is true for all other pieces of software.
Build time will always increase until no one can be bothered to build it any more.