At least, in theory.
It's not about knowing assembly or not. It's resources, time, cost, money, ROI.
Yes, once measurements were introduced after the Velvet Revolution, water consumption by households fell to half almost overnight.
I had to build a one-time export yesterday. Am I gonna spend a lot of time optimizing the speed of it? Or am I going to make it work and get the export to the client faster?
It would've wasted my time and the clients money if I optimized the queries. Sure, the export itself took longer. But overall, the task was done quicker.
If the client wanted this export to run on their server frequently, I would've spend the time making sure the export itself runs faster.
For exmaple, in your example of a one-time export it might also make sense to write code that does not meet all requirements and explicitly can not handle certain edge cases, if it's more effective to fix these cases manually than try to automate that.
> when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand