I think all of your points boil down to the same mantra as the article: 1. is the human variant. 3. finding which thing to "do less" of (benchmarking/profiling

I think all of your points boil down to the same mantra as the article: 1. is the human variant. 3. finding which thing to "do less" of (benchmarking/profiling seem to be the "do less" ways of doing this task). 4 from the low level CPU perspective. As I see it, all "four stages of optimization" are the application of the same rule just from different perspectives.