But I have a different experience (probably because we work in different areas):
Most the performance problems of the products I ever worked were purely systemic.
They boiled down to technologies and architectures having been chosen for "organizational" rather than technological reasons.
And "organizational" is in quotes because sometimes it was just blackmail: I worked with two developers who quit in protest after the prototype they wrote in Scala was deemed not good enough and dropped for... being too slow, ironically.
