It sounds like this is actually a solved problem. The actually problem I experienced was that there are many possible ways to build things and all of the ones I tried until now had slow incremental build times.
I’m going investigate pscid because it sounds like it might be fast without requiring a particular editor/plugin setup. It would be nice if there were a couple of boilerplate repos with known fast configurations that people could clone as starting points. Another option might be a tool similar to create-react-app that allows people to easily create a new project with a fast build tool-chain already set up.