I don't think this is a reasonable remark.
The whole point is that the 1% penalty is added on top of whatever choices "the likes of Sony and Nintendo" make. If they have alternatives that ensure them a performance win just by chosing the right tool to work with Unity, they won't choose the wrong one.
D had a chance in the games industry with Remedy and lost it, instead a language that supposedly lesser one, is being adopted by major platform owners.
No, it was not a reasonable remark. Pointing someone else's choice changes nothing. The point that you keep missing is that performance is a key decision factor, one among many, and baseline performance penalties imposed by a particular choice of programing is a factor that adds up to all other choices. If you degrade the performance of your offering without any relevant tradeoff, you're making it harder to justify it's adoption.
Feel free to insist in your personal assertion. Those who care about performance feel strongly about gratuitously pile performance penalties without any meaningful tradeoff to show.
Minecraft wouldn't never have happened if Notch was busy discussing if it would be acceptable at all doing it in Java.
Just like too many in HN dream of being the next FANG, too many worry about the ultimate performance when their games would hardly win a fraction of Minecraft when placed into the market.
Getting acceptable performance in my game despite my focus on playability and time to market is one of the benefits of platform choice. I want to focus on my game, not overcoming platform limitations.
I am not saying a single 1% makes a difference but the idea that performance in the platform does not matter is wrong.
Especially that research OSs were written in managed languages, often with better performance!
But nobody said this. Maybe we're too deep in the thread for anyone to remember, so let's refresh our memories. The claim was not that performance doesn't matter, or that 1% never matters, but that any language 1% slower than D is currently could categorically not be considered a systems programming language.
That's even more absolutist and absurd than "performance does not matter".