It's a very common criticism

Yes they do. I don't think it's totally unreasonable. Slow compile time is a big productivity drain. But it's not as bad as people often make out for Rust - in large part because compilation speed has at least doubled since Rust 1.0, but its reputation is still based on the 1.0 compile times.

And some specific projects do have substantially bad compile times. When your incremental compilation time is 20 seconds where in other languages it's instant... That's notably worse.

But I don't think it should be a deal breaker. C++ has dealt with similarly bad compile times for decades and people don't like it but it's never been enough for most of them to switch to another language.