Similar questions have been addressed by either installing rails-dev-tweaks or by pre-compiling assets - which is then a problem if you're actually working on the UI/JS - which is where half the dev time is usually spent.
Ah, I was wondering how come my development environment had slowed down so much in the past couple of releases. Had I known enough to check for it I probably would have found out about that rails-dev-tweaks Gem sooner.
Anyway, yes I think that this release fixes those issues. However, there appears to be a problem with the SASS @import command and partials[1] so I haven't been able to fully test my system yet with all it's assets working properly.
For us it went from (depending on the machine) something like 40s down to a <5 seconds which was a massive improvement (CSS development was almost impossible for a while there).
They have indeed been crippling for front-end development, and majorly under-reported since this summer. So if you're facing any of these issues, please participate in the GitHub Issues threads I linked above and help the relevant teams diagnose/improve the problems.