We ought to ban people saying that quote, due to the way it has been abused to avoid considering performance _at all_.

“Intentionally suboptimal” is also a strange way of phrasing it, as it makes it sound a bit like you’re intentionally building something bad, as opposed to “only as good as it needs to be”.

In general I avoid considering performance at all. Instead, I focus on adding testing and instrumentation. When the telemetry tells me I have a performance problem, then I can solve that part while being confident that the performance improvement doesn't change the functionality because I first invested in tests.