Am I alone in that I never have had an issue with performance with pre-commit? granted I don't work on projects the size of the Linux kernel, but I haven't had any complaints.

I've used pre-commit very sparingly but it has happened and I also have no idea why this project need to exist? Why would pre-commit ever lead to performance problems? I get that the processes that are hooked in can be long running but the pre-commit itself? Why would it take any time at all?

Never had a problem. It adds negligible time to each commit and I have several hooks in use. Running tests takes several orders of magnitude more time.