Comment by Anon1096

This is really just an example of survivorship bias and the power of Valve's good brand value. Big tech does in fact employ plenty of people working on the kernel to make 0.1% efficiency gains (for the reason you state), it's just not posted on HN. Someone would have found this eventually if not Valve.

And the people at FB who worked to integrate Valve's work into the backend and test it and measure the gains are the same people who go looking for these kernel perf improvements all day.