I've worked on C++ codebases where linking modules took over 10 minutes with a trivial change. Per config. Granted, that was with BFD, and I sped it up a good bit by switching to gold where we could... which meant our Windows MinGW builds still spent 10+ minutes per config, since those were stuck with BFD. But at least our Android and Linux builds were a bit faster!

But I like to touch common headers - say to document logging macros, and printf-format annotations to catch bugs, or maybe to optimize their codegen - and those logging macros are in our PCHes for good reason - so that still means rebuilding everything frequently. Which ties up a lot of build time (30-60 minutes per config per platform, and I typically have a lot of configs and a lot of platforms!)

Sometimes that can help, but don't forget that you still need to run integration tests on the whole thing.