For many use-cases yes, but there are crates bottlenecked on different things than the codegen backend.

But I don't think that's the point. We could get rid of LLVM and use other backends, same as we could do other improvements. The point is that there are also other priorities and we don't have enough manpower to make progress faster.

This is somewhat true but also a bit misleading. Lot of the problems comes from how rust interacts with it, and how are rust projects structured. This ultimately shows up as time in LLVM, but LLVM is not entirely responsible for it.

The article briefly mentions Cranelift, though only as a link destination not by name. And that's a way to faster Rust builds, for sure! Currently only recommended for dev builds, not production.