This. When flat out milliseconds per syscall is deemed to trump actual functionality and usability of the operating system as a whole, your priorities are simply wrong. Nerding out over obsessive metrics is literally that - nerding out over useless micro-details rather than real-world needs. When your loyalties fall solely upon a race-to-the-bottom speed on POSIX standards that are 40 years old... sigh.
We come across this kind of thing whenever someone releases a new pre-alpha, first-time-endeavour, operating system. Arguments like "It's not 100% POSIX!". Excuse me, but if you think that POSIX is the only valid foundation for an operating system, you're pushing your previous experience as the only facet that matters, rather than any actual measure of quality or merit. The ability to easily port existing applications is not the only metric that is going to dictate the operating system of the future. POSIX is so ancient at this point that it should have been iterated upon a multitude of times by now. It's so out of date it's almost a joke - we're basically still building our operating systems with horses, without even considering that a mechanical or electrical engine is even a possibility.
For 99.9% of use cases, this kind of metric is so far beyond worth even mentioning that it sounds like a farce. Nobody cares about the performance of mkfile. Nobody. If you're one of the very few people wasting your energy on such a thing... holy shit... get over it and modernize your way of thinking. We're not living in 1980; and no, it's not that the "reasonable old ways no longer gain any respect or recognition" - it's that you are trying to live in the past. Move on.