It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when an argument in that area starts using fake math to drive a point home. Top-tier engineers spend 6 months to have 20% impr

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when an argument in that area starts using fake math to drive a point home. Top-tier engineers spend 6 months to have 20% improvement that could be achieved by spending 20% more on hardware? Where IS all this coming from? Why is it acceptable to pull out a few random numbers out of our ass and conclude that it's always best to buy more hardware? I know Google literally invented HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 to shave a few % off their hardware costs. And they had to not only implement this in Chrome and Google.com but to make it a world-wide standard. So surely they must be the idiots putting top-tier engineers for 6 months (or more) on such optimization efforts, instead of spending more on hardware? I don't know.