Hmm, interesting opinion.

I was rather thinking on the consumer side, that you will never get anything for free. Everything has a cost.

Somehow I think not optimizing has a midterm-longterm cost as well. Maybe for the dev, maybe not. But I am not sure if it is a free lunch.

If you need to create a product, you anyway need to put in work, so it costs your time. Of course you will put the minimum necessary effort into it to meet the criterias. If it does not require a certain runtime, you will cheat there, but still requires work.

If you optimize to earn more, it also costs your time. So somehow I think there will be either an implicit or explicit cost. That you are aware you pay, or you are not. And I wanted to raise awareness with this post to the fact that everything has a cost, either you know you pay it or you don't.