That depends on the application and the use case, but good performance and good readability aren't mutually exclusive. Easy to read software might not always be the most performant, but it's far easier to improve performance in an easy to read codebase than it is to make a hard to read but performant codebase easier to read.

You do that by paying for better developers ;)

I can often get better latency by throwing a few extra bucks at vertical scaling. Still cheaper than a few hours of dev time a month.

Like I said, it works until it doesn't, and then you do have to optimize for performance to some extent.

The universe puts a hard speed limit on latency, but will give you all the bandwidth you want. There’s something almost mystical about latency, we should be very prudent when spending it.