FWIW I think it'd be a huge mistake for me to spend a bunch of time learning to write performant code! My takeaway from this experience is that I have no idea

FWIW I think it'd be a huge mistake for me to spend a bunch of time learning to write performant code! My takeaway from this experience is that I have no idea which of my sites is going to be popular - most of my projects are not nearly this successful - and that I should be optimizing for speed of creation, not speed of an individual project. My comparative advantage is "writing ok code and making ok decisions very quickly" and I'm going to continue to lean into that.