For what it's worth... It seems I'm experiencing the same. Both macOS and iOS are the most current. What I do is, with every cabled sync, I transfer all new pics from my iPhone to my iMac and at that time I remove all new pics from my iPhone. Then, when iTunes was around, I created a smart photo library that contained the newest 1,200 pics (or so), which would transfer back to the phone. With this, though the pics were no longer available in the camera roll, they would still be stored on the phone on the From My Mac section. Again, back with Mojave and iOS 12, the process would only sync the exceptions. It would only sync the new pics.
With the current OSs, it seems every sync process deletes all pics from the iPhone and puts them back in them from scratch. Though the Finder gives you an idea of this with the pie chart, if you go to Photos on the iPhone and scroll down to Media Types, you'll see the counts going down and then going up. By the time the Finder shows the pie chart complete, the count on the iPhone is still going up.
This takes too long, but it is what I'm seeing.
I've already sent a note to Apple using the Feedback Assistant.
I've noticed that most comments here only mention music, not photos, so it may be that my sync style only aggravates my case. But I'm just trying to explain where the slowness may come from.