Here it opens faster than Sublime Text and much much faster than VSCode. Between Notepad and lite-xl I'd say the startup time difference isn't perceivable, and lite is far far more powerful.

It might not make a difference when using it as IDE - you fire it up in the morning and keep it opened. I use lite-xl as a second editor for occasional note entry and it starts up instantaneously. I found that using a second dedicated editor just for notes is excellent for window management and for cognitive context switching; I hated having notes buried somewhere in main editor tabs among open source code files.