I also encountered this problem and found a solution for my use case. I use IntellijIdea Community and a simple project on Kotlin (Gradle) like Hello World compiled in about 10-12 seconds on very powerful hardware. By default, in the IDE settings in the Kotlin compiler options section, I have Target JVM version 1.8, I replaced it with 17 and now the project began to build in less than 1 second. Screenshort of IntellijIdea Kotlin compiler settings