Good points. Performance not being a primary concern is a meme that really has grown beyond its place. Performance is absolutely a primary concern in very hot code, at execution scales where it means big differences in aggregate hardware/infrastructure cost, energy usage, and so on. Or in space, where transistors necessarily need to be "low tech" huge radiation resistant ones. There will never be a lack of applications for highly optimized software, no matter how small the niche gets. Computing power may be cheap but it is NOT free, nor infinite, nor universally portable.