At the scale of Wikipedia (~10 billion pageviews a month), even a single byte saving can mean terabytes worth of bandwidth saved.
The problem here is that you've switched from proportional thinking to arithmetic thinking in the middle of the thought.
In most cases, if you started with proportional thinking, you should stick to it.
Example of the fallacy: 0.1% of my salary goes to avocado toast, which might not seem that much, but over ten years, that's a thousand dollars!
The fallacy here lies in the fact that a thousand dollars is insignificant over 10 years, but the statement makes it feel significant by switching from proportional to absolute.
"The avocado toast fallacy"?
For example, suppose an engineer who is paid $200k per year can spend a week to implement an optimization that reduces costs by 0.1%. If that is 0.1% of something that costs $50 million per year, then that's not a bad use of time.
Is it not? I don't know. I don't run a multi-million dollar business. So this is an honest question. 0.1% of $50 million is a meagre $50000. If someone is running a business that is spending $50 million per year on something, are they really going to care about a small $50k saving per year?
Spin it around: is it worth it for a sales person who makes $200k per year to spend a week to land a $50,000 per year contract? I think it potentially is, for the same reason, even if the organization as whole makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The thing is, say it takes me an hour to shave off ten bytes in the final build. Value my time per hour at 200$, and the saving of that ten bytes over a year at Wikipedia scale at a thousand dollars, and even investing five times that amount into yak shaving would still be net profitable.
But does it really move the needle anywhere where it matters? If you are serving a million bytes in every response but you manage to trim a single byte from it, I don't think it is going to move the needle anywhere.
Sure it will save a terabyte when you have served a trillion responses. But in a trillion responses you are saving only one terabyte out of an exabyte of responses. That's not much!
In many cases wikipedia probably isn't even paying for bandwidth due to peering agreement.
As far as performance goes, i suspect whether a single byte matters depends a lot more on if the extra byte results in the same number of packets or not.
Remember kids, if someone tries to use unusual time interval (like months for bandwidth-related stuff), they just want to make a small number look big
In either case, they said a single byte saved. Any amount of minification is going to save more than just a byte.
It’s also incredibly low effort to do so.
const index = "Hello HN".indexOf("H")
console.log(index);
>> 0
index == false
>> TRUE
index === false
>> FALSE