I don't think I could disagree more with your post. Every developer you have should be capable of weighing up performance ramifications of their decisions, and

I don't think I could disagree more with your post. Every developer you have should be capable of weighing up performance ramifications of their decisions, and be able to discuss and justify them. Not saying that every line needs explaining but come on... Not their concern? I'm all for getting stuff done but doing a crappy job the first time more than doubles the TTL. Moreover, telling your developers to ignore this stuff means it becomes a lost skill. When you do need them to double-back and profile and bisect everything back to 0AD, they'll be much less capable than a performance-conscientious developer. I don't disagree that over-optimisation is a thing, but a hands-off approach is far more toxic. Big ticket optimisation rewrites should not be something a single developer takes on without their lead signing off. Letting developers do that is a management issue. And "the type of sites I mention[ed]"? I think you misread my post because I was very explicitly talking about e-commerce and webapps. Not CMSes and not usually something you can run entirely static from a CDN. And just because it's static and/or on a CDN doesn't mean it's not bloated to hell and back; that's really the point TFA is making.