We just released Chalk 3 with some large performance improvements. This is what I'm seeing with Chalk 3 and Node.js 12:

~/Downloads/ansi-colors/bench master*
❯ node index

# All Colors
  ansi-colors x 150,257 ops/sec ±0.95% (90 runs sampled)
  chalk x 490,982 ops/sec ±0.48% (94 runs sampled)

# Chained colors
  ansi-colors x 20,

When don't find file from require_relative line, it could be better show better and clear information when exception arise.