aeyes parent
Wake from sleep, not boot. I have a MacBook sitting in front of me and I just tested it: It wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
Was that a hardware or a software improvement?
My Dell laptop running Ubuntu wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
Probably both. Apple Silicon macbooks seem to never actually sleep, they just switch to the energy efficient cores, similar to how iPhones / iPads never truly sleep either. You can tell by leaving e.g. a while loop in zsh running and printing the date + sleep, and when you reopen the lid you'll see quite a few iterations actually completed.