I think you went over the ocean to get water on this test of yours.
I've been using Pest for quite some time, and never noticed any slowness other than the one I myself have created.
This is an example from one of my codebases on how I test the update functionality.
it('updates a valid game', function () {
$validGame = $this->validGame;
$validGame['title'] = 'Some New Title';
actingAs($this->user)->put(route('games.update', $this->game), $validGame)
->assertRedirect(route('games.index'));
assertDatabaseHas('games', ['title' => 'Some New Title']);
assertDatabaseCount('games', 1);
});
The validGame is generated with a beforeEach, I also use FastRefreshDatabase to speed things up.