We are completely on the same page there, though I would say “care about the risk adjusted total cost of ownership.” Early on, the business doesnt know if the product will succeed so the risk is high and any developer time/dollars invested are disproportionately high risk adjusted TCO. Once the product is successful, the operational costs dominate and the risk factor of time/dollars spent on dev time to optimize the code falls, justifying time spent to improve the efficiency across many measures, but those things don’t kick in until there is some measure of success in the market. Until then, risk adjusted TCO for dev time is very very high and needs to be aggesssively minimized to achieve that minimum risk adjusted total cost of ownership.

The point is that cloud computing costs are small compared to labor costs, so it's a waste of time to make a 0.005% cost optimization that takes a week of work.

I would also love to see some examples of a 2G (!) library that people are casually importing. Where have you had this problem?

Labor costs are capital expenses; computing cost is an ongoing operational expense.

In the end, it depends on return on investment. If it is something which will be deployed on running for years, it may worth the effort.