These two things are not even remotely the same thing.
Having users is a path to monetisation but having a high performant app no one uses is not.
In fact, if you have users despite performance, it suggests you have a home run product that can be optimised for performance.
Again, you can’t optimise your way to user growth.
These two things are also not the same. You start with "having users" and assume they're willing to pay and will stick around. You compare that to "having a high performance app no one uses" - explicitly limiting the scenario with an unrelated caveat that no one uses it.
A better comparison would look only at having users vs. a high performance app, which has too little information, or having users that aren't willing to pay vs. a high performance app that no one uses, which leave you in the same boat.
I said explicitly “path to monetisation” not “assume they’ll pay and stick around”.
I hope you’ll agree that it’s easier to find a subset of users that will pay when your superset of all users is large vs a super(?)set of zero.
Do users explicitly care about how many milliseconds somethings takes? No definitely not
Do they care if the application feels slow ? Yes absolutely Do faster experiences subconsciously feel better ? Yes Does that subconscious feeling, impact metrics like sales or conversion ? Yes it does
So people do explicitly justify usage decisions with performance, all the time. Agreed that overall features win out but it's often the case that multiple products end up with broadly comparable sets of features and struggle to gain a persistent advantage there. Once you reach that point, perf can be a competitive advantage.
You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to a product success. We're over two+ decades into the 21st Century and we're still pushing a 20th Century mindset?
Why Lord? Why?