VSE How to render faster? I did go ahead and do my part to look it up
There are answers out there but they are years old and outdated when compared to the current version/build

Currently, I'm rendering a video that's about 20 mins long and it says that the estimate is over 2.5 hrs

My 1st question is if that's normal
And my 2nd, how to optimize rendering

Thanks
Using the Parallel Render add-on will allow you to render, from the Blender Render panel, using all cores, which will give you a speed-up: https://github.com/elmopl/ktba/blob/master/scripts/addons/parallel_render.py

Another thing which may speed up export is to change the colorspace from Filmic to Standard.