Did you try upping the i2c bus speed as

[tiny oasis]

haven't tried it - not sure it would help with the I2C bits I have on hand. That said, CircuitPython (which my current project is based on) does support kicking it up to 200k or 400k, might have to give that a try just to see which of the modules I use often will still work

[rare chasm]

IIRC the vl5 multi cell ToF wanted 1meg i2c as it uploaded the firmware at init/begin().
400k is more common, and 100k is safe for 99.9% of devices.
Think some architectures+platforms support changing speed between calls [so can have slower devices share same bus], but found often have to reinit i2c instead to set new frequency [as no other set frequency command available sometimes].

[tiny oasis]

1meg is pretty quick. Some this starts sounding like I3C

although that can supposedly handle up to 25mbit