Not perfect, because some queries may be more time-critical than others.

You could even annotate every query (INSERT and UPDATE as well as SELECT) with the dollar amount per execution you're willing to pay to make it 100ms faster, or accept to make it 100ms slower. Then let it know the marginal dollar cost of adding index storage, throw this all into a constraint solver and add the indexes which are compatible with your pricing.

Not just indexing, but table partitions, materialized views, keeping things in-memory...

Yes, but you need the context about what is the correct tradeoff for your use case. If you've got a service that depends on fast writes then adding latency via extra indices for improved read speed may not be an acceptable trade off. It depends on your application though.