That's true, but it's got to be a trade-off and a balance of risk, because "Performance over everything" makes no sense at all: the most performant thing to do

That's true, but it's got to be a trade-off and a balance of risk, because "Performance over everything" makes no sense at all: the most performant thing to do is to store no data and return no data. And even with that trade-off, I'd argue that there's a level of correctness that should be non-negotiable. Missing data might be OK, but corrupting data on the way in is bad, and failing to process everything might be OK (eventual consistency and all that) but you should meet your published guarantees and you shouldn't corrupt your results. So I would argue for correctness over performance, with the caveat that "correct" has a technical meaning specific to the project.