I find it very difficult to believe that anything could be significantly faster than dd, done correctly a dd copy can approach nearly instantaneous no matter the size of whatever is being copied.
The drawback to using dd which is not mentioned in your reference is that there is no integrity check, but that would probably be true of anything that does byte level copying.
Also, “outdated” in Unix usually only means out of fashion, not that the command doesn’t or can’t do its task well.
TSU