Same issue here. Medallion architecture in a test setup with 150 tables. SETTING_UP_TABLES takes 11 to 15 minutes, everything else together takes 10 minutes to do the incremental update (40K bronze rows, these fan out to asset tables, not much data!).
This is with serverless DLT, ADLS gen2 storage.
Any ideas how to make SETTING_UP_TABLES faster with this number of tables?