"Secure by default", turn knobs if you need more speed
"Fast by default", turn knobs if you need more security
Not that the knobs will be always available for each design decision, but sometimes they are there and you can turn them at your own risk. It probably would be wise to understand the consequences. Some people will prefer the peace of mind of knowing that safe defaults are in place if they don't change anything. Those will probably align with OpenBSD here. Some people believe that security is something you bolt on afterwards. Those definitely won't like OpenBSD design decisions.
They certainly set the defaults for some usecase, it just happens to be more security-biased than most. They don't ship an OS for an airgapped toaster, so it can't ever literally be "secure by default", it's just a compromise on the tradeoff scale that's more security-oriented than most. It still needs to be usable (for some set of people) and it still has to achieve some baseline level of performance to be usable - I was trying to get some clarity on the latter.
