I've only had some college physics and no aeronautical engineering so I could be way off. Of course there are other factors like the amount of lift per unit of velocity and so on...
This is true of form drag. Airplanes are also subject to a somewhat counterintuitive induced drag that is inversely proportional to airspeed. The minimum total drag is therefore somewhere between a slow speed and a fast speed.
There are three optimal speeds depending on what you're trying to optimize. Maximum range (distance per unit of fuel) is best glide speed, which would be a painfully slow way to get somewhere. Maximum endurance (time per unit of fuel) is roughly max endurance divided by 1.316—even slower. "Optimum cruise," or Carson's speed (max speed per unit of fuel) is roughly max endurance times 1.316.
I'm pretty sure best glide speed times 1.3 can be achieved with less than 90% thrust from the engines of a typical commercial airliner.
https://www.wired.com/2012/10/can-we-build-a-more-efficient-...
It’s still less efficient, but some of that squaring works to your advantage.
But you measure speed in this context relative to the air, not the ground.
The fact that the plane is now moving across land much much quicker due to winds aloft is completely irrelevant from an aerodynamics perspective.
The plane doesn’t even “know” that it’s getting there sooner.