It's not trying to get "something for nothing", it's trying to tune your brain/body to the workload you actually perform by altering the way signals propagate.

It's not trying to get "something for nothing", it's trying to tune your brain/body to the workload you actually perform by altering the way signals propagate. Tuning low-level settings to optimize the stack for the workload expected is standard engineering practice. Heck, we even do it in hardware: deciding if we want higher single-thread performance or higher throughput for a given heat envelope.