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When you are dealing with "hundreds of thousands of files," as sometimes we all do, you learn to have patience. If you are asking even a modern computer to "do a big task," it might take a little time. No biggie: "it reliably gets done." And that's the only point.

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Not to speak about cache, it all will/may happen without even "touching" the real disk.

It is probably worth noting also that it is (rm -rf <dir>) still the fastest way to delete those files.

I once worked in a data warehousing shop where the warehouse was always two days old. Why? Because the production volume was such that it took two days to load it.

Found it again: Why does rmdir (the system call) only work on empty directory? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

Deleting an entire directory tree is far more resource-intensive given that the space for every single file has to be marked free individually, so it is out of scope for rmdir. To me it seems preventing deletion accidents is a lucky side effect of this fact.

I like that rmdir does not delete entire directory trees so I can prevent myself from accidentally deleting stuff when I don't mean it.

Similarly, I use the "unlink" command if I don't intend to delete more than one file, given that the command is incapable of deleting multiple files in a single command. Some would say rm makes unlink obsolete because it can do everything that unlink can, but unlink just feels safer.

you missed a very important point: rm, rmdir, unlink are just tools and you (as user) need to use the appropriate one.
If you want to remove a single file, an empty dir, a bunch of files, a whole tree ..... you need to do them differently. (do you want to do that in script, or by hand, ...?). There is no single way, no single solution to everything.
In some cases this one is more useful, in some other cases that one is more handy.
It is just wrong. If someone wants to delete a tree, they have to use something, no matter how resource-intensive it is. rmdir is just unable to do that. they need to use something else.
rmdir also can't switch off your TV, is it a lucky side effect too? Or it is just not the appropriate tool to do that.
unlink is just the low level command (system call) to unlink a file, rm is the high level user interface to call either unlink or [the low level] rmdir (depending on the arguments passed). It is not safer, it is just different.

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I also disagree. The original Unix command was not a system call nor was preventing deletion a lucky side effect.

https://linuxgazette.net/issue49/fischer.html

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And find "<dir>" -delete. It should be equally as fast.

No, because you're now doing TWO operations; one is a find on whatever (in this case, a wild card), and the second is a delete after it's found. Not sure why any of this actually matters at all.

No, it is not important at all, just if you are interested. It was told how heavy is that rm -fr operation, but actually that is a most lightweight solution to delete a tree.

Actually find is much slower than an ls command (you can safely measure it), therefore find -delete would be definitely slower than rm -rf