Huge performance issues moving from cordova 6.5 to 8 due to cordova-fetch

This is for a project with a wide variety of plugins ... about 25. This may be above average, but not extreme. I've updated the project from cordova 6.5 to cordova 8. Cordova 8 always uses cordova-fetch to install plugins, so I can't opt out. Before, I was not using cordova-fetch.

$ time npx cordova@6.5 platform add ios
  23.85s user 9.26s system 130% cpu 25.414 total

$ time npx cordova@8 platform add ios --nosave
  402.44s user 61.94s system 119% cpu 6:28.09 total

That takes over 15 times longer. --nosave was used since this is the default behavior for 6.5.

For subsequent installations using --save (or default) the performance is still like this.