I mean... fair point? I'm not claiming games are uniquely performance-critical.

You're right that HFT, large-scale backend, and real-time systems care deeply about performance, often with far more money at stake.

But those domains are rare. The vast majority of software development today can genuinely throw hardware or money at problems (even HFT and large backend systems). Backends are usually designed to scale horizontally, data science rents bigger GPUs, embedded gets more powerful SoCs every year. Most developers never have to think about cache lines because their users have fast machines and tolerant expectations.

Games are one of the few consumer-facing domains that can't do this. We can't mandate hardware (and attempts at doing so cost sales and attract community disgust), we can't hide latency behind async, and our users immediately notice a 5ms hitch. That creates different pressures- we're optimising for the worst case on hardware we don't control whilst most of the industry optimises for the common case on hardware they choose.

You're absolutely right that we're often ignorant of advances elsewhere. But the economic constraint is real, and it's increasingly unusual.