For sure. This is always true. In my case part of the update is updating the host from 8.3 to 8.4, so many packages involved.

And my observation is that it seems as if the process updates all the packages one by one as subsequent commands, with an unneeded long time in my opinion.

Each time it seems it goes through transaction test and so on...

Very very suboptimal if it is true and confirmed.

From an ansible point of view it seems that it happens something like this

- name: ensure a list of packages installed
  yum:
    name: "{{ item }}"

   state: latest

  loop: "{{ packages }}"

instead of

- name: ensure a list of packages installed
  yum:
    name: "{{ packages }}"

    state: latest

Where {{ packages }} is a pre-computed (probably in a previous step) list of packages to be updated.

Gianluca