Because "performance" is not related to "functionality". If you skip corners (eg. panic instead properly forwarding an error, hack a new implementation over an

Because "performance" is not related to "functionality". If you skip corners (eg. panic instead properly forwarding an error, hack a new implementation over an existing interface, etc), you induce a long term cost each time you have to figure out why the code is misbehaving. Technical debt is all these architectural issues which incurs a long term cost because minimum deliverables had to be met. Also, the first response to "performance" is always gonna be "throw more CPU/memory", not "let spend a month dev-time to rearchitecture." Tech-debt is only getting addressed when hardware can't meet the requirement, "performance" is just a marketing argument to sell it to management.