I assume you're running proprietary drivers? Because I've never experienced anything like that on mesa. Launching an app that opens a window with a gl or vk context is so fast on my almost 10 year old hardware that it's nearly imperceptible.
I have been using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for more than 2 decades on various hardware, both desktops and laptops, mostly with Gentoo Linux.
Opening an OpenGL context or any other OpenGL operations have always been instant.
In similar style I recently wiped a device that I thought had firmware that was slow to boot but it turns out that a hang and subsequent timeout due to something I had long ago misconfigured had been obscured by the previous setup that defaulted to hiding all details during boot.