As I've read through the post, seeing phrases like "Why this matters for performance", usage of em-dashes and lists/bullet points, screams AI written to me. I appreciate you saying it wasn't, but such is the fate of who wrote this to write like LLMs do nowadays. I also liked to use em-dashes and bullet lists but am consciously avoiding them now.
I interviewed a guy from Microsoft who was working on AI, and he literally speaks like this.
Like, using the words "leverage", "matters for...", "as for", and so on. And you could almost hear him doing the bullet points.
When you work with AI a lot, it changes your vocabulary.