[iknowstuff]

You're so right. When did Apple take the wrong turn? What caused to become this slow at launching simple apps?

Gatekeeper? XProtect? Swift? SwiftUI?

[dannyw]

Probably all of them? On modern versions, Gatekeeper still adds a bunch of milliseconds and possibly a RTT network request to Apple before the first launch of many apps; although I think Apple's binary checking is cached for 24 hrs or something.