Agreed, but you should also keep in mind that this means extra work. Often the difference is negligible. But if you e.g. strace a syscall-wise very busy process

Agreed, but you should also keep in mind that this means extra work. Often the difference is negligible. But if you e.g. strace a syscall-wise very busy process and pipe that into grep, all the logging strace does that is then piped over to grep just to be discarded by grep eventually, may actually affect performance a lot; while strace -e avoids this extra work.