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Was that really so bad in terms of performance? Surely .htaccess didn't exist there most of the time and even if it did, that would have been cached by kernel so each lookup by apache process wouldn't be hitting disk directly to check for file existance for each HTTP request it processes. Or maybe I am mistaken about that.

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The recommendation was to disable it because:

a) If you didn't use it (the less bad case you are considering) then why pay for the stat syscalls at every request?

b) If you did use it, apache was reparsing/reprocessing the (at least one) .htaccess file on every request. You can see how the real impact here was significantly worse than a cached stat syscall.

Most people were using it, hence the bad rep. Also, this was at a time where it was more comon to have webservers reading from NFS or other networked filesystem. Stat calls then involve the network and you can see how even the "mild" case could wreak havoc in some setups

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