I've been using Cocoapods for dependencies for as long as I can remember. Personally I never really got along with Carthage, but some people prefer it.
Over the weekend I came across a post titled "Using CocoaPods with pre-built frameworks instead of source files" which has radically decreased the build time on some of my projects. It describes how you can set up the cocoapods-binary plugin to precompile your dependencies which dramatically reduces the amount of time Xcode needs to build your app.
In two small-to-medium sized apps with 5-10 dependencies I saw upto 10x improvements. A clean build (with nuked derived data) going from about 90 seconds down to 9. 🤯🤯🤯
If you're using Cocoapods you really should try it out.