alt Hacker NewsThis is not a problem which needed to be fixed, it's an improvement in efficiency - though a costly one. We are talking about a company which do make their own custom microchips so you could very well be right, but it may also be that they weren't even aware this was possible.
Citadel executes trades in about 10 microseconds, so a 500 nanosecond reduced execution time is a 5% improvement. For a company which executes trades for hundreds of billions a day, this translates to real money.
Your sarcasm indicates that you have no clue as to how important such an improvement can be for some actors. Some do though; the repo has almost 100 forks and 2K stars after just two days.
I saw a few years ago one group buying spools of fiber just to 'slow down' the trades. As they were submitting them to different datacenters across the country. They wanted everything to show up at the exact same time so no one would front run their trades on different datacenters. They are willing spend millions on HW if it gives them an edge in the market. They would buy bespoke boards that could hold 16x the RAM if it gave them a 50ns edge.