> in addition to being vague and essentially meaningless in most contexts

It's not vague, it has a literal meaning. Efficient. The definition comes from the French word "performant", the meaning of which goes back to the 17th century.

This isn't people going "ohh it's related to performance, let's make up a word that sounds similar", like "supposably" or similar.

It's "Let's take an established word with the same roots that has the same meaning as we want and use it".

See a sister thread for commenters mock debating over whether it means improved throughput or reduced latency. If a speaker indeed intends to mean “efficient,” then it would be thoughtful to opt to instead use “efficient” for clarity’s sake. Performant has been so often recklessly used that the meaning has been diluted to mean general and vague “fastness,” from which most thoughtful people cannot glean any specific meaning.

Still better data than the literally nothing that you brought to the discussion so far.

> In nearly every instance it can be replaced with “good” or just dropped altogether with no loss of information,

That is obviously true and easily checkable. If that is not true, explain how in rational terms.

> Multigenerational LRU: more versatile, straightforward than Linux's

Neither of these have as much information as the original headline. The version I came up with that's actually equivalent to the original without using the word "performant" has to use a word that means the same thing.

> Multigenerational LRU: faster, more versatile, more straightforward than Linux's

And that still means I don't get to use the "parallel more" construct.