You are precisely telling me the ways in which I can get faster hardware: GPU, accelerators, the I/O stack and SSDs, etc.

I agree that the software layer has become slow, crufy, bloated, etc. But it's still cheaper to get faster hardware (or wait a bit for it, see M1, Alder Lake, Zen 3, to name a few, and those are getting successors later on this year) than to get a good programmer to optimize your code.

And I know that we'd get much better performance out of current (and probably future) hardware if we had more optimized software, but it's rare to see companies and projects tackle on such optimization efforts.