You leveled up past a point a surprising number of people get stuck on essentially.

I feel likethe mindset you are describing is kind of this intermediate senior level. Sadly a lot of programmers can get stuck there for their whole career. Even worse when they get promoted to staff/principal level and start spreading dogma.

I 100 percent agree. If you can't show me a real world performance difference you are just spinning your wheels and wasting time.