I was able to reduce the time to minutes by turning off Wi-Fi on the iOS device in the Control Center during the "Copy" stage. It seems to make it switch back to USB.

A macOS Command Line Tool is almost like a Playground if you want to play with just Swift coding basics (no UIKit or SwiftUI). It's easier to write Swift code without having to spin up an iOS Simulator. Another benefit is you can debug the code with a breakpoint (blue flag) and you can step through it line by line to watch it run execute each command.

The Xcode Welcome screen has a shortcut to create a project.