Sorry for the bump, but this delay has gotten to be ridiculously long. It's now at 5-10s—what'd I'd expect from a HDD. The irony is that booting the mac from being fully off is about as fast to show the desktop as just opening the laptop from sleep and logging in. Also, most of the time my login screen looks like it has rendering issues (see attached photo)
My Mac is out of warranty sadly, but all hardware diagnostics check out. I've clean installed the latest macOS, reset PRAM and SMC (before and after the clean install), and I can't get this to go away. I do use Filevault to encrypt. Is there some sort of issue in power settings? I used the default ones from clean install...
Can anyone offer any advice or share that they have the same issue?