Comment by CyberDildonics

Unfortunately people do keep repeating it to excuse the fact that they don't know how to optimize in the first place.

Anyone who has done optimization even a little knows that it isn't very difficult, but you do need to plan and architect for it so you don't have to restructure you whole program to get it to run well.

Mostly it's just rationalization, people don't know the skill so they pretend it's not worth doing and their users suffer for it.

If software and website were even reasonably optimized people could just use a computer as powerful as a rasberry pi 5 (except for high res video) for most of what they do day to day.