I suspect you’re referring to a gameplay programmer as opposed to a game engine programmer, even though your claim includes engine devs. There are more gameplay devs than engine devs, and gameplay devs will think about perf less and use a profiler less often.

I worked at the intersection of engine and gameplay for a decade, and I’ve personally never seen an engine dev who doesn’t use a profiler nearly every day, and I certainly did. If you watch game dev presentations at conferences (Siggraph, GDC, etc.) you will generally see profile-driven development for new engine tech, they use profilers heavily and monitor performance rigorously.

I worked on engine and tools, not gameplay, though obviously i also did interact with gameplay programmers too, though most of my work was on engine side. Yes, relatively speaking, gameplay devs did think about performance less but that is on a relative scale - engine programmers also didn't think of it as much as implied.

Sure people did use profilers and the engine did have various profiling views and i personally wrote some of them myself - both for profiling performance as well as I/O since for some time i also worked on loading/streaming too - but as i wrote, those were when things became visibly bad. Most of the time people were either busy trying to fix bugs or busy trying to implement new features - and optimizing them became something to care about later, if needed (and there was enough time). And TBH usually that was fine - at some point i found some big inefficiency in one of the engine's core data structures, but that same engine was already used for a well received game at the past and the inefficiency only became obvious because the current (at the time) game was several times larger. So the thing performed fine for the original requirements and, at the time, trying to do more would be a waste (after all, it wasn't until long after the original game the engine was made for was released that the decision to make a much larger one was made).