I use i3 and win+enter is bound to spawn a new terminal. I had read that kitty was supposed to be super fast, but I tried it out and spawning a terminal was taking .5-1 second!
I use --single-instance and it spawns much faster (and eats way less memory). Even without this switch it does not take this long on my machine (certainly less than half a second), but yes it takes noticeably longer than, say, urxvt.
I looked it up and found https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330 where the dev says:
> that's just python interpreter startup time
So... The answer is just "yeah it's slow". When you're used to a few milliseconds for terminal spawn, .5s is eons.