No, it's not unique to PHP devs. I've encountered C++ programmers that obsess over pass-by-value versus pass-by-reference and strings and minor things like that

No, it's not unique to PHP devs. I've encountered C++ programmers that obsess over pass-by-value versus pass-by-reference and strings and minor things like that, even after that code has been written and proved to be fast enough, while ignoring the real bottlenecks that demonstrably hurt performance. A lot of times when there's a big glaring bottleneck, it needs to be solved at the macro level, by reworking the approach to macro-level features, seeing how you can get to the same place by doing fewer time-consuming operations. Those folks are penny-wise, pound-foolish.