In particular I've seen way too many people use this term as an excuse to write obviously poor performing code. That's not what Knuth said. He never said it's ok to write obviously bad code.

I'm still salty about that time a colleague suggested adding a 500 kb general purpose js library to a webapp that was already taking 12 seconds on initial load, in order to fix a tiny corner case, when we could have written our own micro utility in 20 lines. I had to spend so much time advocating to management for my choice to spend time writing that utility myself, because of that kind of garbage opinion that is way too acceptable in our industry today. The insufferable bastard kept saying I had to do measurements in order to make sure I wasn't prematurely optimizing. Guy adding 500 kb of js when you need 1 kb of it is obviously a horrible idea, especially when you're already way over the performance budget. Asshat. I'm still salty he got so much airtime for that shitty opinion of his and that I had to spend so much energy defending myself.