The effect of this seems to be "I wish everything was slower and then the naive implementation would be the best implementation".
No, a stall is only a thing because branch prediction exists. Get rid of it and I can go back to not caring about the deep underlying architecture of the hardware I may potentially be running on. And not doing branch prediction isn't inefficient... that's a bizare statement. Branch prediction and speculative execution are themselves inefficiencies (i.e. spending power to do things that will turn out to not be needed fairly often).
>the naive implementation would be the best implementation
Not the naive implementation. A well thought out, developed implementation that is defeated by deep hardware details. The promise of high level languages was always to avoid having to know these sorts of details. In designing an algorithm I should be worried about things like how often I access data (e.g. can I cut down on how many accesses with some clever structure?) and the like. Now that's all trumped by deeply knowing the low level implementation.