But personally I’ve been working at higher levels of the stack the last few years, where these kinds of decisions seem less important.
And on another level, it seems like coders in general aren’t that interested in vector oriented languages and techniques which makes their study somewhat isolating.
I used a very similar setup, first time I needed to implement a tree. Now, I'm a fan of Eytzinger layout. (referenced in a previous comment in this thread)
Yeah, most coders in general don't seem to be as interested in this stuff, but it's still necessary. They'll want more performance.
I don't think programmers actually care about performance as much as they care for convenience. Every year the stack moves a bit higher, and everyone is okay with websites taking days to load on brand new phones with Gigabit wireless connections. There are companies that care about performance on the margin, like stock trading firms, but to get into one of them, you have to get pretty lucky, or come from a pretty special background. Even the banks are using Python more and more, these days.
People will always care about performance because they will always want more functionality.
I bet you care about the performance of your database or how fast your pages load. You want your streaming videos to be skip-free and your phone calls to sound lifelike. Performance will always matter. Because while people like me will be always trying to squeeze more, "the other side" will always be ready to use it for some new feature.
I'm not under the impression that people care at all, to be honest, outside of certain communities. If you're not in those communities talking about performance as a corner stone feels mostly like screaming into the void.
but then accumulated outcome of this is the slowness you see in web software!