My guess is you were using the reference AOM encoder. This is actually a real branding problem! It was never designed for encoding speed, and it shows.

SVT-AV1 is the production encoder you should be using. It's high quality and fast in software, and should really always be the default.

For now most of the focus has been on the slow encodes, but in theory it can match h264 for speed and quality on encoding. In practice I've seen it get very close already.