Compare this with the first sentence after the abstract: "Data-oriented design (DOD) grew when game developers needed to use modern hardware architectures for

Compare this with the first sentence after the abstract: "Data-oriented design (DOD) grew when game developers needed to use modern hardware architectures for performant games, and existing software processes did not meet their needs." So, I think performance and DOD have been closely tied together from the start. There has been some evangelism to push it out of "it's just for optimization" territory (and reasonably so), but I'm not sure I agree with their notion of "core".