The fallacy here is that if we focus on performance we could, instead, be using that time to make the application better.

The reality is that non-performant apps aren't non-performant because they're doing so many cool things. No, that compute is wasted. The digital equivalent of pushing a box up a hill then back down 1000 times.

I mean, the types of performance issues I've seen is like: grab 100,000 records from the database, throw away 99,900, return 100 to the front end.

Optimizing that saves orders of magnitude of time but the thing does the same thing. Like we're just being wasteful and stupid. Those records we throw away aren't being used for some super cool AI powered feature. Its just waste.