My guess is you were using the reference AOM encoder. This is actually a real branding problem! It was never designed for encoding speed, and it shows.

SVT-AV1 is the production encoder you should be using. It's high quality and fast in software, and should really always be the default.

It is not a branding problem. Only in recent few years has SVT caught up to AOM in terms of encoding quality.

Using SVT for encoding in the early days is basically trading quality for speed.

For now most of the focus has been on the slow encodes, but in theory it can match h264 for speed and quality on encoding. In practice I've seen it get very close already.