The fallacy is assuming it takes more work to get good performance. When what’s really lacking is clarity about the problem and solution.

Optimizing code for max performance does take work. But just not doing incredibly dumb things and writing simple programs just takes education (and re-education).

I can’t count how many times I’ve replaced a distributed system with for loop.

You are assuming a greenfield scenario, in large brownfield projects it is quite easy to degrade performance by innocent changes. That is usually when the perf goes to trash.

It takes a lot more work to keep performance good in a large project than just letting it degrade.