I never stopped caring. It just turns out it never really mattered for a large fraction of cases. There's still plenty of cases where you absolutely do care: l

I never stopped caring. It just turns out it never really mattered for a large fraction of cases. There's still plenty of cases where you absolutely do care: low level firmware, kernels, absolute performance, and high reliability. It's more a case of not worrying about it when there's much bigger risks in a project than having loose guarantees about allocation performance or fragmentation.