Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.
*Transactions* are the same speed they always were. It's *cheap transactions* that are quicker to confirm.
The choice is always:
- Pay higher fees, get faster confirmation
- Pay lower fees, get slower confirmation
If anyone's thinking "but low fees are confirming fast, so that's wrong", then try paying less than 10 satoshis per byte. It'll still take many hours, or even longer than that, for your transaction to confirm.
There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)