The constraints and things that matter are different. I've had both experiences like you and also the opposite ones. As an example the constant factor in time u

The constraints and things that matter are different. I've had both experiences like you and also the opposite ones. As an example the constant factor in time usage is surprisingly important in games. Amortized time consumption is not the absolute end all be all. Designing any soft realtime application is subtly different from traditional application. Your frametime budget is 16ms. It's rock solid. You spend 17ms and you're down to 30fps and you could've just spent 33ms. That's actually the reason why garbage collection is big no no in games. One cannot afford even 1ms gc pauses. And in server world that's considered blazingly fast. If a game is for some reason developed using a language with GC it's just skipped by making object pools. And then tediously checking that no allocations and freeing actually happens during a frame.