Comment by chipdart

> Why wouldn't they work on improving NTFS performance instead?

There are other old-school techniques which are far easier to implement and maintain, such as using RAM drives/partitions. Expensing 32GB of RAM is simpler than maintaining weird NTFS configurations.

Splitting your project into submodules/subpackages also helps amortize the impact of long build times. You can run multiple builds in parallel and then have a last build task to aggregate the all. Everyone can live with builds that take 5 minutes instead of 3.