I've always been fond of "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" [1], but still... wasting resources makes me feel bad. I feel like the guy that buys 10 plastic bottles of 0.5l water instead of 2x2.5 litres.
The guys building ( owning ) Slack, cryptocurrencies, e-commerce websites are on the other end though. I hardly can count a day when my MacBook's fan doesn't spin like crazy, because I'm just visiting an HTML page to read the text.
In other words. Yeah ... you can save some precious time to optimise that, because you don't want to be the person that starts the fans of colleagues' Macs ( having a docker image with your app running on my Mac ). Energy is what you are saving and that's priceless in today's polluted world.
On several projects the management and sales team were at odds with the dev team about app performance. They wanted it faster and the dev team was full of premature optimization cargo cult members. By cult member, I mean people who say that phrase to get out of thinking.
The line between right and fast is blurry. There’s a big chunk of refactorings that improve readability and performance and if you work with those you get better at your job, avoid the cult members and please the business.
Now that I’ve typed that last paragraph I want to go through Refactoring and categorize the ones that fall under “right and fast”...
A much better solution is to fix the image format to better handle the usecases that it needs to handle. (This is what I'm working on at the moment.)
It could be either via a hole in that executable, or just by using the executable to greatly simplify the penetration and / or privilege escalation.
That said, now I have "good" broadband, I pay a lot less attention to the image size.