Whether a question is valid and worthy of exploration has nothing to do with whether the listener deems the intention behind it to be "correct". The preposterous notion that certain questions are part of a sinister "'Just asking questions' rhetorical device" and must be ignored long ago became, like "dogwhistle", the first resort of those that don't want the statement/question dealt with at all.
You can only optimize at your current level of abstraction. Writing JavaScript? Have fun, there's a floor to your performance, because you're on the 28th floor of the abstraction skyscraper, and you can only go up. Part of the issue is that developers don't know any better, the other part is that everyone suddenly decided that four virtual machines crammed inside each other like a matryoshka doll is the only valid way to write software anymore.
JS by itself isn't that bad. You could calculate pi digits reasonably fast using JS.
The problem usually is: really poor code that is blocking, triggers a million rerenders for every interaction, insane bloat, or just the absolute massive amount of abstractions through packages. Plus HTML + CSS is really slow.
They don't know how, that's the entire problem. Six months in a crappy boot camp doesn't teach you a single thing about computers qua computers. The industry has been suffering with mediocrity for so long, that even today's managers don't know what performant software looks like. But as long as people get paid, nobody cares. It's depressing as all hell.
It is. I'm contracting for a company right now and they have a number of scripts to automate various day to day things. More than once I've taken a look at them and have been able to 100x their speed due to a little common sense. Caching some things, not pulling ALL the data when not needed, precalculate stuff outside of hot loops, etc. Like really basic stuff.
I don't know if not being able to remember filesystem conventions is Linux's fault. Computers have a lot of esoterica and random facts to recall. How is this one any different?
