The choice of improving the performance of the compiler before working on the package manager was deliberate. With the new compiler you will be able to have plenty of dependencies and compilation times / memory usage will remain reasonable. The same could not be said of the bootstrap compiler.
For us compilation speed is part of the main value offering of Zig.
Is this working? stage2 seems to take similar and large amounts of time to compile a non-async-using program from our project with no caches and with caches after a whitespace change.
The linked post mentioned that the compiler itself does compile faster, but not by much. Memory usage is the greatest impact of stage2.
The speed will come when the native backends are finished. Right now the compile time is mostly llvm. The idea is a native and fast backend for debug (development) builds, and llvm for optimized releases.
For us compilation speed is part of the main value offering of Zig.