We've been making developer experience optimizations _long_ before they started demanding high salaries. The whole reason to go from assembly to C was to improve developer experience and efficiency.

It seems fairly reductive to dismiss the legitimate advantages of increased productivity. It's faster to iterate on ideas and products, we gain back time to focus on more complex concepts, and, more broadly, we further open up this field to more and more people. And those folks can then go on to invest in these kind of performance improvements.