I’m surprised by this experience because I think most user studies seem to find that speed improvements can have a big impact on important metrics for apps/webs

I’m surprised by this experience because I think most user studies seem to find that speed improvements can have a big impact on important metrics for apps/websites used by many people. Presumably your users don’t have much choice in what software they get. Another argument for speed is that developers tend to have high-end hardware so things that are bearable for them may be significantly slower for users. This matters more for phones (wide range of performance) and things that depend on network speeds.