From the article:

> My goal was to take my Unchartevice laptop with its strange Zhaoxin x86_64-compatible CPU...

> Sure, this is a laptop with a CPU broadly equivalent to old Intel Atom CPUs...

Yes, guix pull is slow, but the author is using some old/exotic hardware. The last time I tried guix on a 5th gen dual core i5, the initial pull was not that slow. And as other commenters have pointed out. The first pull is the slowest by far.