In case anyone reading doesn't realise* - that's not the kind of thing you'd be doing to get a speed up. I can't think of how addEventListener could lead to a 1.001x speedup of an app, let alone a 100x. You don't ever need to create listeners in loops, so a single operation like that just isn't a optimisation target. If you need to listen for an event that could come from lots of nodes, listen for the event bubbling up to the parent of those nodes.

* I'm sure Matthew realises but just gave the first example that came to him.