I find comments like "I've been using <the tool> forever and never noticed <this> problem" a little annoying. But, I fall into this camp here. I'm not trying to dismiss other people's criticism that the slowness has had a negative effect on their workflow. But, here it goes, I use exa as my ls replacement and I've never even noticed it was slow. And, for me, the chief value really comes down to exa's color coding of results. It helps me see the information more easily which I feel has a cumulative effect of speeding up my workflow.