For most things you would use this for, or ImageMagick for that matter, you are almost certainly better of using libvips[0]
I can't recommend libvips enough. I recently switched to it from ImageMagick+tificc in a flatbed scanner appliance and am seeing a minimum of a 2x performance increase with minimal memory usage. libvips makes it easy to setup a pipeline of transformations and utilizes all CPU cores by default.
Even outside of using via pyvips, I've noticed similar performance gains over ImageMagick by using the CLI of libvips. https://www.libvips.org/API/current/using-cli.html
I almost didn't click through to read about libvips, since I only want to use these tools from a CLI/shell interface, but - would you look at that - it's got command line bindings! I'm going to have to give this a try to see if it can do some of the "magick" stuff...
https://github.com/libvips/pyvips
The idea is that complex CLIs like imagemagick's are almost complete programming languages, and need a lot of learning. It's much better (imo) (and less work) to have a good binding, and to lean on python for the programming side.
libvips is mostly self-binding. It has good introspection support, so the core of pyvips is just 200 lines of code, and automatically updates itself for new libvips versions.