Even if the issue is resolved, it makes sense to tell which version of Drush you used - and Drupal version. Added: Drupal 7 I see now from the captcha version.

Doesn't drush help tell you that there is a --debug option? Try it ;-)

In stead of saying that drush sql:connect and drush status returns the correct information, show us the output. (You can mask the password if that is your concern.) And there is no "site" command - it's "site:install" ;-) Just remove that from your post. Anyway, my first guess is that you are missing the needed database modules when running PHP as CLI, not through the webserver. (the output from drush status would have told us something about this.) Does php -m return mysqli and pdo_mysql?

Even if the readme says that "composer global require mglaman/drupalorg-cli" is deprecated it works just fine. I prefer using cgr - github.com/consolidation/cgr - when I do global installations.

This isn't an answer to your question, but I suggest that you change your workflow slightly - start to use the mglaman/drupalorg-cli project. Install it with Composer (like you do with Drush). The just run "vendor/bin/drupalorg issue:apply 3044059" to create an issue-branch and apply the latest patch for that issue. If you have any changes to the issue, commit them to the branch and run "drupalorg issue:patch" and "drupalorg issue:interdiff" to get files for uploading to the drupal.org issue queue.

@Jav Sorry, I forgot that Drush is run in Cmd, not Mingw64 / Git Bash, when using ADD. Then my comment wasn't very useful. I have you tried to increase debug when running Drush - to see where the time is spent?

This is most likely not a Drush problem, but rather that the shell (Git Bash) is terribly slow at all operations. I suggest reading stackoverflow.com/questions/4485059 and stackoverflow.com/questions/2835775 As a quick start, try export PS1='$' and see if the speed of Drush improves - taken from the first question above.

I see that you edited your reply and made it clearer that the version number in the create-project command is for recommended-project, and not drupal/core-recommended - great! Do you know if the maintainers of recommended-project plans to create a release/tag for all Drupal versions? If not, we can't expect to be able to install a specific Drupal version using create-project.

I have updated my answer. And included a link to aram.cz/article/rehash-md5-password-drupal-8

Yes, I was wondering about that - if Drupal would recognize an MD5 hash without any prefix. Maybe you should add the information you found to drupal.org/docs/8/api/migrate-api/…