Better solution: Apple stops treating MacOS like a toy and gives it a proper package manager. I'm tired of hearing people float workarounds for a problem that can be solved by just holding Apple accountable for once.
good luck with that
I use brew primarily only for packages that are only available on brew. I’m moving to nixpkgs for my packaging needs as soon as the M1 support drops.
Brew upgrade takes less than ten minutes or so for me. Things that influence this will be the amount and size of your installed packages and whether they have prebuilt binaries ("bottles") or if you need to build them from source. The latter is on your package maintainers.