I don't understand how anyone can spend a career in software development, and still have such a poor understanding of the process. Space and time are far from the only concerns.

>As an example, someone who thinks of the machine as something that can evaluate list comprehensions in Python and use OO to access data elements has no clue whatsoever about what and how might be happening at the memory level with their creations. Hence code bloat and slow code.

Not having to care about details that aren't contextually important is a good thing. When someone is constrained more by development time than by computational resources, working in a high level language means you're explicitly shunting low level concerns so you can spend more time dealing with domain logic.

There are many situations where finishing something faster, which will run 10x slower and use more memory, is a worthwhile tradeoff.