Well, thank you for pointing out that hierarchical bar charts do a pretty good job at showing the hot path.

So my (and I guess your) workflow is then to fix the top-X hot paths, and then re-profile, etc.

The attraction of flame graphs, as I understand it, is that you can get the same information without the need to iterate. Which is obviously very valuable if you're operating on single-shot bug reports, but... how exactly? (Not a question directed at you, obviously, but more towards the general discussion)