But at 50 to 100 MBytes/s on a multi Gb/s line I find it better, it's less the download than the time to install that bother me.
Interestingly I found myself using ultra minimal distro vm, and installing nearly nothing on them (qubes os) and just shard the apps: the startup / update of the main gui linux is trivially fast, each vm only has a little subset of apps I care about, and when I trigger a many-vm update they do it in sequence and just update their own subset, meanwhile I can fully use the other vms.
Also I tend to use stable-like distros now like debian and barely see updates coming in anymore, compared to my fedora youth when there was several updates a day, some breaking everything.