I'd say so
It's worth noting that in terms of the process that is taking a while, it shouldn't inherently be much slower than, say, a much more minor upgrade. So, generally, as long as your production server doesn't exhibit the same issues normally, I don't expect the 2.1 upgrade will trigger anything like that for you.
FWIW when I developed exclusively on Windows I tried a bunch of different WAMP-style stacks and actual WAMP and XAMPP themselves really didn't cut the mustard unless I got into the nitty gritty of configuration.
Before I moved exclusively to macOS I was using:
bitnami.com
But on my still existing (but rarely used) Windows PC I use:
Laragon is a fast & powerful local development environment.
laragon.org
Both of those should be more fit for purpose for XF development/testing than WAMP and XAMPP.
I guess you just have to now weigh up whether it's easier to just wait for this to finish, or start trying out an alternative. As Mike says, you'd generally expect the entire upgrade to finish way within 15 minutes. Your forum isn't too unwieldy in size, and doesn't appear to have a complicated style so I'd agree that even 15 minutes is too long.