In this context the 10ish second boot time seen in the video is unfortunate. I guess lot of that can be blamed on RPi, although I suppose netbsd might not be super optimized for boot times either.
Admittedly this is just a pet peeve of mine. And 10s is not the worst boot time out there.
* The SD card I'm using in there is not the fastest. Easy fix.
* The kernel has some annoying pauses, particularly in WiFi initialization, that add a couple of seconds of delay. To fix this, I wanted to do driver loading via modules once the shell is already up and running, but unfortunately NetBSD hasn't modularized those drivers yet and it didn't seem trivial to do. Should be possible though.
* The rc startup framework is sluggish. I've been pondering a rewrite in native code to avoid huge shell scripts and to allow for parallel execution of early boot services, and that should help -- but it isn't done. (Ideally I'd just replace init with my own thingy.)
* The file system is not read only, so there is an initial fsck that adds a bit of a delay. I want to get to a point where it _is_ read only, which would eliminate this pause.
All in all, agree that 10 seconds is very far from "instant boot", but there is a lot of room for improvement.
A Librebooted ThinkPad takes 10-15 seconds to reach a login prompt which I think is perfectly satisfactory considering that prior computers with roughly equivalent computing power (say a Cray machine) would have taken considerably longer to get fully up and running from deadstart. Think of all the tape drives, the cooling system, the frontend mini etc. that would have to spin-up, start up or initialise.
Therefore statements like “Remember when turning a computer on meant instantly jumping into code?” are confusing since I would guess that the vast majority of computer systems throughout history did not satisfy this requirement.