What I learned over time is that the business side is more important than the technical side. We are making these things to better peoples lives after all. And

What I learned over time is that the business side is more important than the technical side. We are making these things to better peoples lives after all. And business requires things to be sustainable. Profit and costs are ever present things we must all be thinking of. There is definitely a tradeoff between business and user experience many times. And the business requires code be maintainable by average developers. One argument I found effective for the kinds of people that you are talking about is to get past the “academic” correctness of the argument and move it towards the business side. They are technically correct, after all. But they may not correct be from a business perspective. It is important to frame it in a way that spares their egos. Most (but not all) very smart people know they are smart and it is a large part of their identity. If you challenge that in any way, they will push back aggressively. How I have learned to frame it is that, from a business perspective, we must make the software both performative AND maintainable. And by maintainable I mean, maintainable by the average human, which they clearly are not. They are smarter than most, but for the business to live beyond them, they need to write the software in a way that an “average” person can maintain it. It can become a new challenge. How to squeak out the best performance while also writing it in a way that someone dumber than them can understand and maintain it. Another way to put it is, there are quite a few brilliant people that can write brilliant code, but only the best of the best can write brilliant code that is also understandable by normal people. Good luck!