I find it much faster now, which is quite funny to me because back when Homebrew was new (and a lot less opinionated) it was much faster than MacPorts, especially with the bottles (binary packages) feature.
Today, MacPorts has binary packages, doesn't randomly force incredibly slow updates when I just want to quickly install something or run a package search, has entirely opt-in telemetry through installing a package (mpstats) and still lets me customise packages (through the variants system, which is more powerful than the with --with-feature system Homebrew seems to have abandoned).
The only pain point I've found is upgrading to new macOS releases, though I've often found just reinstalling MacPorts itself will get me going again in a pinch without having to take inventory of my installed ports and reinstall everything from scratch.