Moreover, as someone who's spent a significant chunk of my career basically being a professional optimizer, one of the worst things to fight against is code inf

Moreover, as someone who's spent a significant chunk of my career basically being a professional optimizer, one of the worst things to fight against is code infected with a plethora of micro-optimizations. Micro-optimizations tend to be based around fragile, case-specific assumptions and when they're used, a smarter, deeper optimization to a more generic version of the problem isn't reused because somebody decided that "every bit counts". 100% agreement on "if it's not showing up in your profiler, don't optimize it".