Thanks for the great comment. As you think about your overall career, I guess I'd ask you to not think of this as merely a stupid game.
In the complete context, you're an accomplished technology professional who will continue to develop skills, talents, and capabilities throughout your career. How you put your talents to work in solving level-appropriate challenges and problems is important to your progression in your career.
So starting with the meaningful, real, achievements -- your ever-improving aptitude and problem-solving abilities, applied against problems of ever-increasing complexity and depth -- how do we best express that in a short, asynchronous format of about 300-500 words?
Inevitably, the compression of a human experience to this reduced, written, format will leave out meaningful nuance and important clarifications. But in the overall system, it's necessary for the participants involved to have some way of prioritizing the expense of time, money and attention on interviewing and recruiting specific individuals. The alternative is unworkable for everybody - we simply can't conduct full interviews of every applicant, it wouldn't be a good use of company's OR applicants' time.
So if, for the system to work better, we need to adopt this practice, then how can you best represent your true professional capabilities within a limited, constrained document such as a resume. My post suggests it is with numbers, and my observations of actual behavior with recruiters and hiring managers show that numbers are better.
A great technical resume can help get you the interview. In an interview, especially a behavioral interview, you'll be asked deeper question about that 50% reduction in API load time. If it turns out that it was just a few minutes to implement, the hiring manager will, rightly, question your technical judgment in putting that forth as one of the 2 or 3 or 4 most significant accomplishments in your career at that company.
So rather than viewing it as a game, I'd suggest starting with the real achievements you've had in your career, focus on those and how to best represent them in brief, written format. Tricks or shortcuts like mentioning a task that only took a few minutes won't work well, and leave you behind where you could be with more appropriate achievements.