> And of course real life tells us that those "performance tweaks" will never happen.

I seldom wish I could post images on here, but I really would love to share a photo of the surprise coffee mug my work sent me, with a screen cap of a completely obliterated Y axis on a performance monitoring graph. Granted I don’t get to spend all my time hunting optimizations, but some teams/orgs/companies do very much value performance very explicitly.

Edit: and I’m definitely not a game dev. Though I’ve been itching to borrow some game dev techniques that are quite applicable for my domain (particularly ECS, entity component systems, which I suspect have far broader applicability than their adoption outside of game dev).