I think he's just rebelling a bit against the culture of caring about scale and performance. A culture that has been pushed out by FAANG that also has some acad

I think he's just rebelling a bit against the culture of caring about scale and performance. A culture that has been pushed out by FAANG that also has some academic undertones. The subtext he's giving is: it doesn't really matter. That's what I read into it, because that's what I identify with. I've met so many fellow CS students (back in the day) who cared about performance optimization. I never cared. I just wanted it to be simple, working and done. I cared about clean code because I had a hard time understanding anything else. I felt allergic to over-engineering because it portrays a whole host of thoughts/emotions that just hurt my brain empathizing with it how it would feel if I'd have those. So I kept things simple too. Usually the repercussions aren't really there. When they are there, then they need to be there and it's usually a sign that your product and the place in the market you're at is evolving. Code is a living thing. Sometimes a big rewrite is necessary, but if that simple unoptimized code held up for 10 years (which is what I'm experiencing), then I'd argue that's okay.