The key part here is that OpenBSD take a conservative approach to things, but when they do fix things, it is usually an elegant fix, not a hack to save time now, at a cost of security later.
The key part that I got was that, while OpenBSD (rightly) prioritizes security over performance, all those little performance degradations can add up if you don't pay attention to them.
it runs on some very underpowered machines, so i guess it's not that much of a performance hit.