Comment by dijit

Spot on. And it's worse than that: you're not choosing between a 10% slower product and a faster alternative, you're choosing between a slow product and losing access to everyone still using it. That's not a market choice, it's a hostage situation.

We can see this works in reverse: developer tools, CLIs, and local apps where network effects don't apply (ripgrep over grep, esbuild over webpack) performance actually matters and gets rewarded. Developers switch because they can switch without losing anything. But Instagram users can't switch to a lighter alternative without abandoning their social graph.

This is why the "developer time is expensive, user hardware is cheap" argument only works in the absence of competition. In genuinely competitive markets, efficient code becomes a competitive advantage worth investing in. The fact that it's "not worth optimising" is itself evidence of market power, not sound economics.

Your automotive analogy actually understates it: imagine if switching to a better car meant your old car's passengers couldn't ride with you anymore, and that's closer to what we're dealing with.