As someone who's spent a few decades working in C++ codebases I'm not sure how this is a Rust specific problem.
Last large-scale C++ codebase I worked on took 60+ minutes to compile when you touched the precompiled header.
In fact, I've found it to be common to have binary-only library dependencies in C++ which makes it harder to tell what those downstream dependencies do.
I think you just run into it faster in Rust: I tried making a simple REST HTTP server (like 60 LoC) using actix-web and it pulled in over 200 sub-dependencies and took something like 10 minutes to compile.
This toy program written using Boost.Beast or something similar would compile much faster. Of course I would have spent all day setting up the library instead of waiting for it to compile...
Last large-scale C++ codebase I worked on took 60+ minutes to compile when you touched the precompiled header.
In fact, I've found it to be common to have binary-only library dependencies in C++ which makes it harder to tell what those downstream dependencies do.