On one hand, Google created the JS-Engine V8 which finally made the web fast. But on the other hand, did nothing to fix the RAM issues that came with that until recent years.
So I see it as "Let's do performance only when it's an advantage for us". Which all of the OP examples falls to. OP want to conclude from that that performance=advantage so everyone need to work on it all the time (because who will ignore advantages?), but all we see is if(performance=advantage){refactor}. Which does not support his conclusion.
Example cases are startups, monopoles, high cost (like refactoring bank code) etc. which have other silos of advantage.
But even if that turns out to be true, it still means programmers have to care about performance! It just means they need to learn two modes of programming: “throw-away”, and “performant”. There would still be no excuse for dismissing performance as a critical skill, because you always know the throw-away version has to be replaced with a more performant version in short order.
That kind of argument is great. We should have it. What we should not have are excuses — claims there is no argument to be had, and that performance somehow won’t matter anywhere in a product lifecycle, so developers simply don’t have to learn about it.”