Developer? As in one developer? Is this a mistake. If not, I am shocked
And multiple of those devs have posted blog updates about various optimizations they've done. So performance isn't one person either.
They have poured a lot of work into making their game run efficiently. No matter how much they do that, players will always expand their factory until the CPU cannot keep up.
They even have a chart of lines of code in Factorio over the years.