Generating bundles with many references has non-linear performance

Generating bundles with many references exhibits non-linear growth. The following benchmark demonstrates this:

Benchmark 1: bundle (refcount = 100)
  Time (mean ± σ):       4.4 ms ±   0.5 ms    [User: 1.8 ms, System: 2.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):     3.4 ms …   7.7 ms    434 runs

Benchmark 2: bundle (refcount = 1000)
  Time (mean ± σ):      16.5 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 9.6 ms, System: 7.2 ms]
  Range (min … max):    14.1 ms …  21.7 ms    176 runs

Benchmark 3: bundle (refcount = 10000)
  Time (mean ± σ):     220.6 ms ±   3.2 ms    [User: 171.6 ms, System: 55.7 ms]
  Range (min … max):   215.8 ms … 224.9 ms    13 runs

Benchmark 4: bundle (refcount = 100000)
  Time (mean ± σ):      9.622 s ±  0.063 s    [User: 9.143 s, System: 0.546 s]
  Range (min … max):    9.563 s …  9.738 s    10 runs

Summary
  bundle (refcount = 100) ran
    3.79 ± 0.61 times faster than bundle (refcount = 1000)
   50.63 ± 6.39 times faster than bundle (refcount = 10000)
 2207.95 ± 277.35 times faster than bundle (refcount = 100000)

We should investigate whether we can improve performance.