Wavedashing makes the game more technical, but not really faster except in a few situations IMO. It makes shields much stronger, and it takes so many frames that it's not really any faster than pivoting or dash-cancelling in this game. Wavelanding is generally faster, but not by a ton. I think we'll honestly have to see how fast the game is once the meta has developed more.

In Smash games just about everything can be jump canceled; Wavedashing requires jumping.

In melee Aerial dodge halts momentum, allowing you to cancel upward movement after jumping; Wavedashing/landing requires aerial dodging

Combine these two thing and you've increased input speed by at least 15% off the bat.

Console games also run @ 60 fps, which doesn't make the game faster but from a development standpoint, balancing the game and maintaining speed can be difficult... Landing lag is needed, ending Lag is needed. The change from 9b to Beta is a step in the right direction.

with all that being said for the most part, this game isn't slower than melee in terms of game speed. It'll look a bit slower cause we don't have a way for fox's to remain grounded neutral ~7 frames after a run up shine. But if you analyze some of the tech, characters can zip across the screen at speeds above that seen in any smash game for the most part.

9bs meta was to spam moves bc everything was safe on shield and nothing had landlag
things like tech chases didnt exist bc tech and getup animations were random lengths
beta's meta is different in the right ways

more floaties/zoners/lame characters as top tiers instead of spacies and fastfallers

e.g isaac, samus, goku, MM, pac-man are all high tiers
vs. in melee where you have only a couple of this archetype of character (samus, puff, peach), and these characters aren't anywhere near as prevalent as in ssf2