All these things are possible to do, even though only developers need them. Why shouldn’t the same be true for useful profiling abilities? Because of the 1-2% penalty?
Visa makes billions per year off of nothing but collecting a mere 2%-3% tax on everything else.
The whole point of an analogy is to expose a blind spot by showing the same thing in some other context where it is recognized or percieved differently.
CPUs spends cycles for features (doing useful work). Enabling frame pointers skims off a percentage of the cycles. But it's the impact on useful work that matters, not how many cycles you lose. The cycles are just a means to an end. So x% of cycles is fundamentally incomparable to x% of money.