This implies that if a developer works half as long on something, all of that money that would be spent on them is spread out amongst their users. Which makes a

This implies that if a developer works half as long on something, all of that money that would be spent on them is spread out amongst their users. Which makes absolutely no sense. Abstractions MIGHT make your code slower. But there's a reason we're not using assembly: Because the minor efficiency hit on the software doesn't match up with the bugs, the salary towards the experts, the compilation errors, etc. A VM is a pretty good tradeoff for users, not just devs.