alt Hacker News> people simply don't care
I don't think that's right, even for laypeople. It's just that the pain of things that take 5 seconds when they could take 50 ms is subtle and can be discounted or ignored until you are doing a hundred things in a row that take 5 seconds instead of 50 ms. And if you don't know that it should be doable in 50 ms then you don't necessarily know you should be complaining about that pain.
It's also that the people who pay the price for slowness aren't the people who can fix it. Optimizing a common function in popular code might collectively save centuries of time, but unless that converts to making more money for your employer, they probably don't want you to do it. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html