If you are not willing to make this trade then how much of a priority was run-time performance, really?

It's never the case that only one thing is important.

In the extreme, you surely wouldn't accept a 1 day or even 1 week build time for example? It seems like that could be possible and not hypothetical for a 1 week build since a system could fuzz over candidate compilation, and run load tests and do PGO and deliver something better. But even if runtime performance was so important that you had such a system, it's obvious you wouldn't ever have developer cycles that take a week to compile.

Build time also even does matter for release: if you have a critical bug in production and need to ship the fix, a 1 hour build time can still lose you a lot here. Release build time doesn't matter until it does.