I worked in a place where dev workstations were far beyond the end users', and when devs tested (mostly local, not multiple systems across networks), there was

I worked in a place where dev workstations were far beyond the end users', and when devs tested (mostly local, not multiple systems across networks), there was no basis in the customers' reality. Endless performance problems were masked in development, and then very noisily evident when it reached customers. Performance testing was largely reactive and far removed from the creators of some terrible code choices, so they'd tend to shrug ("Works fine here") until you analyzed the hell out of it. Now, the code was a big C++ environment, and compilation speed was a problem, but maybe a means of testing in a throttled state would have prevented a lot of grief much, much earlier.