I sometimes want update to be faster when .julia isn’t in fact empty, or e.g. in my test adding Plots.jl to an empty folder.
I want to ask was your .julia for sure empty? What I think might be happening, is similar to my test. You had an old 1.4 install. In my case I truly have an empty .julia and just added Plots.jl (to Julia 1.5.1), to have a non-empty folder for a previous version.
Then in a later version, Julia 1.6 I did:
(@v1.6) pkg> st
Status `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml` (empty project)
Note, .julia isn’t empty, only that file. Maybe what you saw assuming .julia empty?
Then I did:
(@v1.6) pkg> update
but it was even quicker than with truly empty. I’m just thinking could stuff from older version in the folder (e.g. if packages there not on latest version) interfere? [I just saw your answer now about only on Windows, it might be a bug, report it? or already done?]