> apt is just annoyingly slow

A lot of that is due to aggressive use of fsync. apt tries hard to be robust against power failures when changing the system.

When using it for something ephemeral (say, part of a CI workflow) you can disable fsync and let it rip. It's still not as fast as apk but it's several times faster than normal.

  apt-get -yq install eatmydata
  eatmydata apt-get -yq install (all the other things)