It can be substantially faster in some cases. Notepad++ (with several plugins) start up goes down from around ~1.03 sec to ~0.61 sec on my machine (with wineprefix active).
9b7669592d6f8b40976b571b70f8543777d35167 is what introduced this performance regression. I don't know why exactly, but it made my Notepad++ noticeably slower when launched from a file manager (so it's not just at wineprefix startup overhead), which is very annoying.
-- v2: win32u: Cache is_virtual_desktop.