> it's usually more "cost efficient" to write normal fast-to-write code that isn't maximally effective, let the compiler do its magic, and call it good enough.

For the last six years my full time job has largely been optimizing games where most of the team has been working with this mindset. Sometimes someone spends a few days of just getting things done, followed by others building on top of it. This leads to systems which are not fast enough and take me weeks or even months to optimize.

We even got together at my last job and created a series of lectures on performance and best practices for everyone, including artists, to get ahead of this type of issues. It was apparently very appreciated, especially among the non technical staff who said it was valuable and they had no idea.