That’s not really the point here. The UI on command line apt is instant, regardless of the package size you always know what apt is doing at the moment. Compare that to any recent updater that just throws vague status messages at you with no indication of whether anything is actually happening.
Is that true also when the package is 100 GB?
Also last month I ran update on raspberry pi, and the kernel header package took an hour with no indication of progress except for heavy disk activity.
It's broader than that. Fedora's package manager, dnf, is quick and snappy but it's GUI counterpart is sluggish and always hangs mid update.
Been using KDE native updater as much as command line. Couldn't spot any difference and it's as fast as cmd, never had any issues with it.
Nice. I've been thinking of switching to the KDE spin. My bad experience is with dnfdragora that comes with the default Gnome and XFCE spins.