> The only thing that matters is to be first.
To quote a famous asshole: "Real artists ship."
Or another "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough™"
Network effects are real and being first to (idea) market has its own benefits. Who would have thought, speed of development has its own merits.
It is possible to have the cake and eat, meaning: have performance and be first, as has been shown recently by Casey Muratori himself in a very public debacle.
People who care about performance also care about speed of development. The only people saying it's impossible to reconcile both is the people who religiously dismiss the need for performance in modern software.
I think the main point of his view is that with current hardware advances we should be able to have a cake and eat it too. We can have both the features and the speed, but we don't care about that. The only thing that matters is to be first.