I finally got rid of R4.1 on my i7-1065G7 since the R4.0.4 installer works with its updated BIOS. I redid the tests and the results were much snappier:
debian-10-minimal (fresh download, not updated, kernel 5.10.8-1, using a modified version of wind.gmbh’s script):
4.08
4.18
4.16
3.89
7.21
4.14
3.92
7.53
4.05
4.01
Mean: 4.7
Median: 4.1
Range: 3.6
R4.0.4 is clearly faster than R4.1 when using the same kernel. There are some outliers, probably from some underlying processes, but otherwise the start times are nearly half that of R4.1. Anyone know what might be causing this?