I'm of the opinion that the argument that we shouldn't optimize without measuring is only true to a degree. Most of my experience is with building engineering

I'm of the opinion that the argument that we shouldn't optimize without measuring is only true to a degree. Most of my experience is with building engineering software/tools using C++, so the considerations may differ with different types of development, but sometimes I've found that the "don't prematurely optimize" philosophy can turn into "don't think about performance considerations when writing the code". I would prefer that my developers use their judgement to assess what approach provides a good balance of performance and maintainability (even if that judgement can sometimes be wrong) and then possibly circle back to profile/optimize their code using more objective measures. The problem is that in practice, there's often not time to circle back and perform proper profiling. In those cases, I'd rather have the developer's imperfect judgement-based performance tweaks in place than none at all.