OMZ is slow, been using zinit since it came out because OMZ and antigen were so slow to start up. Recently I found zsh4humans [1] which benchmarks much better than any other solution, is portable, and has everything I need with sane configs.
Although development has stopped recently, I have found that nothing beats zsh4humans: https://github.com/romkatv/zsh4humans
It's very fast and includes most if not all the features you might need.
zsh4humans is the most recent zsh “trick” I’ve discovered. zsh is a bit like emacs when first installed: it can do a lot of things but it’s not nearly as useful without a lot of manual configuration. I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t have more stars on GitHub.