And yet... :)

I think there is just a current (I've seen it mostly in Jr engineers) that you should just ignore any aspect of performance until "later"

and, I guess, context does matter. If you need to make 10 calls to gather up some info to generate something, but you only need to do this once a day, or hour, and if the whole process takes a few seconds that's fine, I could see the argument that just doing the calls one at a time linearly is simpler write/read/maintain.