From a practical point of view, in many cases the performance critical sections are tiny compared to the rest of the codebase. Imposing such a cognitive overhead on the programmer when 90% of the code are executed once a second just to make those 10% really really fast, and then screaming "performance!!!" is not very convincing. Just use a high-level language and drop to C when needed.

Anyway, the author later says he just enjoys writing low-level C++ code, however unpractical this may be. In which case I don't really see the point of defending his choice.