yes, when placing even a single tile the 32x32 area needs to be recalculated.
since the version 1.3.0 this process got a huge upgrade in performance (if you go to an earlier version you would be shocked by how inneficient and slow the process was jejeje...). now we have batch processing, which increases this speed a considerable ammount, as well as other things.
but still, the process could be improved. haven't figured it out though, at least without compromising the save size: the mod could store some internal data to increase the speed, but that would just increase the larger the save gets.