Though, I will note that you picked a framing with absolute timing here. That is the root criticism here. If the headline would be "team saved 2ms off 28ms startup routine," it would still be neat and worth talking about. Would probably not have impressed as many folks, though. After all, if they save 1% off training time on a standard ML workload, that is way way bigger. Heck, .07% is probably more time.

I'm reminded of a fun discussion from a gamedev, I think it was Jonathan Blow, on how they thought they were smarter than the ID folks because they found that they were not using hashes on some asset storage. He mused that whether or not he was smarter was not at all relevant to that, as it just didn't matter. And you could even make some argument that not building the extra stuff to make sure the faster way worked was the wiser choice.