alt Hacker NewsWho pissed in your Java this morning, gramps? Performance has nothing to do with whether you’re “the programmer” (whatever that means, I assume that’s what you consider yourself among this sea of mediocrity around you) and “React dev”. It’s all about incentives, and truth is that performance isn’t very high priority for majority of software.
There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually. There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.