This could be a special case of what I like to call "efficiency bias". It is probably cultural and probably driven by a huge (and widening) gap between what mos

This could be a special case of what I like to call "efficiency bias". It is probably cultural and probably driven by a huge (and widening) gap between what most people think they need and what they actually can afford. As a consequence, "have more for the same amount of $ spent" is perceived as obviously good, even at the cost of significant optimization effort. So then squeezing a bit more $ out of _anything_ is also perceived as self-evidently-top-priority.