Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.

Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have.

IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand.

Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution.

It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down.

Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.