What's faster: gh, or an API call?

When examining a user's profile and recent activity, we're only looking at public information. I started this using gh because it makes it easy to make api calls. But it has the drawback of requiring that people have the gh CLI tool installed. I believe the one thing we're getting from gh that might be hard to replicate as well with a public API call is the correct remote to look at, when processing PR and issue numbers. It's still worth considering http API calls, because then only some actions would depend on having gh installed.

Some starting questions and tasks:

• Consider a current call that's made: gh api users/ehmatthes --jq '{login, name, created_at, company, blog, location, email, bio}'
  • What's the equivalent public API call over http?
  • Is there any meaningfully different response time between the two calls?
  • Are there any gh calls in the project that can't be replaced with a public API call?