It is most likely not a performance issues right now, but every pessismisation compound and catch up to you eventually.

36B vs 16B today, tomorrow you need an array of it, and now it isn't cache aligned, and more than twice the overhead.

Most likely instead of manipulating a 36B fixed length string, it is handled as a dynamic string, for extra runtime memory allocations, most likely consuming at least 64B per allocation. Etc etc.

Do this all over the codebase and now you know why all the moderne software is a sloth on what was a supercomputer 30y ago.

Probably not, but this is something that would have taken all of ten seconds to get right. And the size and performance impact is multiplied at every tier of their application.

It’s also not just the size itself. Despite being fixed-size in practice, these are variable-sized strings in application code which now means gajillions of pointless allocations and indirection for everything. There are a ton of knock-on performance consequences here, all on the most heavily-used columns in your data model.

Worst of all should they actually succeed, this is going to be absolutely excruciating to fix.