The success of an organization is very rarely dependent solely on website performance. Speed is just one dimension in a vast and multi-dimensional optimization space. Spending time improving performance means you are necessarily not spending time improving one of those other vectors. It is a question of priorities - and suggesting that others who say that other priorities are more important are "emotional" is failing to grapple with that reality.

I don't doubt you have been correct to say performance can be improved. Performance always can be improved. It just likely doesn't matter.