It does, actually. At least don't do it on my dime. Obviously learning is another ballgame.

At the least, it implies that you ought to carefully consider whether you should. Optimized code often makes trade-offs in complexity, flexibility, etc, not to mention the extra cost in development time.

With those costs, there should be a compelling benefit that you get out of it. Otherwise, it's not worthwhile.

Avoiding premature optimization is one of the most important best practices of modern software development.

This isn't premature... the algorithm and performance are understood. That said, I agree that it's not always the best use of time.