Add|Set-PnPListItem with Batch on a User/People field extremely slow

[jagrock]

It seems that even with -Batch parameter for Add-PnpListitem (and Set-PnpListITem) it validates it can lookup the user prior to adding it to the batch. This ultimately means it saves little, to no time.

In an example, updating a list of 26k items it took over 2hrs to even build the batch prior to invoking it. Leaving off the people/user column took 4 minutes to build the batch. Example to test below. I suggest having an invalid UPN as you will see it throws an error that the specified user could not be found prior to the Invoke-Batch execution.

$batch = New-PnPBatch
for($i=0;$i -lt 100;$i++) {
    $valuesHash = @{
        Title = "Demo $i"
        InternalColName = 'Some_Valid_or_Invalid_UPN'
    }
    Add-PnPListItem -List "Demo List" -Values $valuesHash -Batch $batch
}
Invoke-PnPBatch -Batch $batch