Glad I’m not the only one that finds Zsh slow to start
In the article, the author was running kubectl in their zshrc. kubectl was slow. This doesn't prove zsh is slow.
In any case, I’d like to apologize because I clearly offended you somehow, despite being a fellow zsh user and for that I am sorry.
My working understanding is that a program is common to run on these OS'es/hardware/shells :/
He basically had a sleep statement in his .zshrc and removed it.
If your zsh is slow to start, I suggest commenting your entire zshrc and then binary searching it to see what's slow (uncomment the top half only, then bottom half, then the top half of the slow half).