People won't pay for efficiency. People buy solutions to their problems (features), not efficiency.
If it needs to be efficient, it will be (the games example).
The death of Moore's Law may rejuvenate efficient software.
BTW If you use old unix tools on a phone, it's super fast (in a terminal emulator like http://termux.com).
Sadly, the idea of abstractions enabling you to think better (like Alan Kay's point of view is worth 80 IQ points and maybe Jobs' bicycle for the mind) doesn't seem to work, at least for software abstractions. It's far more work than can be justified - more appropriate for pure research (which is instead preoccupied things like esoteric type systems with nice mathematical properties).