Exactly - with the proliferation of Grunt in most modern webapp builds, it is incredibly simple to pre-compile your templates in your production builds. In fact, it's so fast (and I get useful stacktraces when my tpls have errors) that I started precompiling templates in development, too.

I find the bottleneck is 99% the browser's HTML parser and 1% the actual templating library.

If somebody had any tips on how to bring down the "Parse HTML" time spent in the Chrome inspector (see Timeline), I would be interested to know. Tips other than, of course, "parse less HTML".