It's unwise to obsess about raw performance because of various reasons. For example, there might be a library which performs 2x faster than its closest alterna

It's unwise to obsess about raw performance because of various reasons. For example, there might be a library which performs 2x faster than its closest alternative... Yet it might not necessarily be the best option for your project. There are other factors to consider like compatibility. E.g. If the library breaks every time you upgrade your Node.js engine version, it may add some risk to your project and require additional maintenance. Also, maybe the library itself is 2x faster, but once you've added all your application logic on top of it, your product might only end up being 5% faster than if you had used the alternative because, as is often the case, most of the workload is in the business layer. Also, often, performance is at odds with scalability. You often need to make some performance sacrifices to achieve scalability. For example load balancing with consistent hashing adds overhead on a per-machine basis but you can't scale to multiple machines without them.