I think server operation costs are a very legitimate concern, though. People always say "well, you're not Google so it's not that important," but that's precise

I think server operation costs are a very legitimate concern, though. People always say "well, you're not Google so it's not that important," but that's precisely the issue. No small company has the budget to splurge on the biggest and best server infrastructure. A small DigitalOcean/AWS/Heroku plan is probably the most any small business could hope for (dedicated servers = hardware costs out of pocket + maintenance costs + power fees + ISP fees) and any relatively complex server is gonna eat through that quickly. Micro-optimizations may not be worth it, but just switching from an interpreted language to a compiled language can often reduce the performance overhead by an order of magnitude. The amount of oversimplifying you're doing seems to skip every flaw in your argument in my opinion. That's not to say you're necessarily wrong... a C programmer probably isn't worth it over a Python programmer. But writing code with double nested loops for no reason or ignoring basic algorithms is going to cost you big time in the long run.