> I built a startup and paid little attention to perf for years 1-5, and finally in year 6 we started to get bitten by some perf issues in specific tables, and spent a few engineer-months optimizing.

This screams of if I don’t see it it the problem doesn’t exist view of the world.

How do you know it’s not a problem? Perhaps customers would have signed up if it as faster?

The problem is also treating it in terms of business value and/or cost.

A lot of things are “free” and yet it’s ignored.

For most people, in simple cases like turning on http3, brotli, switching to newer instances and many others are all quick wins that I see ignored 90% of the time.

A good design, implementing some good practices etc are performance specific and don’t always cost more.