They're getting faster in Ventura. Moving to the sealed system volume in macOS 11 made them huge and slow to apply, but they're getting better. On my M1 Ultra machine even large updates don't take more than 5 or 10 minutes in the restart stage, and that can include firmware updates for the Mac and monitor (Apple Studio Display). And now with the rapid security patches there are some updates you don't even have to restart to apply (mostly).