Exactly this. And in addition, I think there's lots of potential for touch screen users. As soon as you do not have easy access to a physical keyboard, pie menus can provide a great alternative to keyboard shortcuts.
When you press-and-hold, the menu pops up, and you swipe in a direction for an action. Think of it more as gesture navigation with an on-screen aid to show you what gestures you can do.
There used to be a thing nearly a decade ago to do this on Android, before the current gesture navigation:
touchscreens don't have to be small. one of the only pie menus I can really think of in the wild is Adobe Illustrator on iPad, which is relatively interesting because its an "ipad first" app of sorts. its separate than their desktop apps, and was designed for the larger tablets, not a small phone.
the menu itself is pretty good, especially with the Apple Pencil, which you'd be using to draw on the iPad. Image editing/3d modeling software tends to need a lot of UI, and I think it makes sense for the most part. these tools are hopefully used by everyone. that means more sporadic use — if I'm only opening your app a couple times a week for a couple minutes, I probably won't remember the keybaord shortcuts. not to mention people who are unfamiliar or don't use keyboard shortcuts at all. anyways, bit of a rant since it doesn't answer your original question, but we should consider how to make our computers computable by all users.
I am more thinking about tablets and convertibles. But even on a phone a similar concept could work: You summon the menu with some kind of gesture (for instance dragging over a screen edge). The menu pops up in the center of the screen and you can select an item with just a single directional swipe. If the selected item is a submenu and contains some child items, it will slide to the center of the screen and you can do another swipe to select one of the children.
So you could select an item extremely quickly with just two swipes. And there are already quite a few items at level two! If your top-level menu has eight submenu items and each submenu again contains seven items (+one to go back to the root) you have already 56 possible items in this menu. And you could select one of them in well beyond a second, even without looking at the screen!
