A day will come when CPU speeds and RAM sizes will stop increasing. When that day comes you don't be able to ignore performance, because a lack of performance will mean actual, real-world dollar costs for the client, and so performance will be the #1 requirement of the client.
The client doesn't seem to care, and just sees the 5-20 second webpage load times as totally normal (at my company/industry at least). Our applications are horrifically slow, but we're still the market leaders in our segment
Yes, but will they tolerate 2 minute page load times? 10 minute?
At some point reality kicks in and you start to have to care about the nuts-and-bolts hardware.
LOB applications are made to replace humans and they need to be a multiple of times faster than human operations (+ the extra benefits of automation). And the vast majority of them are. And most programmers are working on those applications.
So there's 0 incentive for what you're saying.
The real heavy lifting will be done, as usual, by a handful of people: OS devs, DB devs, game engine devs, runtime devs, etc.