Operating systems developers should be looking to profile everything. Benchmarking and profiling used to be horribly time-consuming; nowadays, with agents, this is almost trivial. Then valuable engineer time can be spent looking at actually solving and optimising the workloads, from the kernel, to drivers, to user-mode libraries, to vendored applications.
About a decade ago programming was expensive, and we decided writing everything in JavaScript was OK, and wasted everyone's memory instead of using programmer time to write fast and efficient native applications. This is no longer the case.