I did, in a VM with 2 cores.
>> time sudo /usr/sbin/depmod -F /boot/System.map-5.3.12-1-default -ae 5.3.12-1-default
real 0m14.919s
user 0m9.113s
sys 0m0.831s
Are you sure it's not your SSD being sick?
If you fill them up above 70% (I've read) they supposedly get rather slow at
writing, due to erase block sizes and so forth.