For running a single script, I don’t think you have a lot of options to speed it up (it’s doing a lot under the covers, checking if you have the dependencies, creating a new shell, starting a new process). But I think it’s a worthwhile trade-off given you can hand someone a script that needs nasm, python (with certain packages), and other commands; and it will quickly install all the packages from binaries and run the command/script with no fuss. (think of examples where you need to do sudo apt install x y z and now you have that on global environment just to run a script).
On a related note, a common use case for nix-shell is to drop you into an environment with certain commands and variables present. I would recommend direnv + nixify which documentation can be found here. This way, if you nixify $HOME/my_project/ which contains a shell.nix, it will drop you into that shell almost instantly when you do cd $HOME/my_project/(or child directory) and will unload almost instantly when leaving.