For me personally apt is just annoyingly slow, but dnf is much worse. I've seen how fast APK is and I feel, that my distro of choice (Void) has a package manager (XBPS) that is maybe slightly slower than it.

I sometimes wonder if it is like that, because XBPS and APK were designed and built by C hackers while apt where done by system administrators maybe. With dnf/rpm I attribute it to this quirkiness I often feel diving into some of Red Hat's tech. Not trying to offend, just wondering and I acknowledge that I am biased.