That's not what I took away from this at all. They specifically say that Lite mode started out as a way to reduce memory consumption at the cost of performance.

That's not what I took away from this at all. They specifically say that Lite mode started out as a way to reduce memory consumption at the cost of performance. Execution time jumped 120%! Then they figured out how to get the memory improvements without the performance hit. The only place where they actually removed optimizations was in generating stack traces, and that wasn't a gain in performance, it was just considered acceptable for that to get slower.