I noticed that when using the single {article} ... {/article} query, with no article specified, so basically just {article} that indicates wanting to use the current article...

The query does this where condition:

(`article`.`id` = 15558 OR `article`.`alias` = '15558' OR `article`.`title` = '15558')

In this case, it would be better to just do the where like this:

(`article`.`id` = 15558)

...which is much much faster (0.0003 vs 0.03). What do you think?

Ah my bad, this was actually coming from an instance of {article [id]}. So it's something I need to fix on my end with {article id="[id]"}. You can close this 😁