To be fair, a 100x optimization is not something easy, and if it was, I would probably blame the development team. Your Web App is a whole lot of code and components in series. An 100x optimization would mean that every single part in there can get 100 times faster, or there is a component that takes maybe 95% of the time and this can be optimized 200x, and the rest of the stack takes 5% of the time and can be optimized 10x.
I do believe that often it's the other way around, instead of a very fast first iteration, people go and build the distributed version that can scale 100x but takes the performance hit that all distributed systems have for network, syncing, etc.
Most of us are using off-the-shelf components, so the space for optimization in our code isn't that big —unless you are a novice developer but compilers go a long way in our time. Thus it may come to choosing the correct off-the-shelf components, like maybe SQLite instead a NoSQL external datastore.