Optimization should have measurable improvement and the need for it should be demonstrable. Neither of these is harder than writing a benchmark and/or performing some simple math on data measured for that purpose before going about the optimization.
> "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
and another instance of the same:
> "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Computer_Programm...
I'm not really seeing much of a "misquote" to be honest. I have always understood this quote to mean that spending too much time micro-optimizing things unnecessarily will waste your time and become a burden to you later. Instead, optimizations should only be performed when the need for optimization becomes manifest.
The "premature optimization is the root of all evil" misquote really caused a lot of damage to favor growth and profit making instead of better software. It seems programmers have a general habit of just implementing things in the most naive and cheap way and just solve any problem with expensive hardware.
We really need a new trend of fast and minimal software because climate change and a finite planet will not allow us to follow Wirth's law for very long.