For sure. I agree with everything you say, and I've experienced the same thing 100 times, myself--including the specific scenario of speeding up someone's MATLAB code by multiple orders of magnitude by vectorizing the crap out of it. People seem to be almost drawn to quadratic-or-worse algorithms, even when I'd expect them to know better.
I'm just a little bitter because of how many times I've been shushed in places like programming language subreddits and here when I've pointed out how inefficient some cool new library/framework/paradigm is. It feels like I'm either being gaslit or everyone else is in denial that things like excessive heap allocations really do still matter in 2025, and that JITs almost never help much with realistic workloads for a large percentage of applications.
I'm just a little bitter because of how many times I've been shushed in places like programming language subreddits and here when I've pointed out how inefficient some cool new library/framework/paradigm is. It feels like I'm either being gaslit or everyone else is in denial that things like excessive heap allocations really do still matter in 2025, and that JITs almost never help much with realistic workloads for a large percentage of applications.