If you switch to a fast NVMe SSD, a side effect is that your attitude tends to shift from a charitable "_maybe_ there's a good reason why this ostensibly IO-intensive task is slow" to "no, there really isn't. There just isn't."
on Linux, package managers and in particular update-mime-database love doing ops serially, with many fsync() calls in between. with a spinning disk, update-mime-database takes ~45s although it could run in ~1-2s. there's a reason why "eatmydata" exists...