This doesn't make sense. Why is performance (via architectural choices) more important today than then?
You can build a snappy app today by using boring technology and following some sensible best practices. You have to work pretty hard to need PREMATURE OPTIMIZATION on a project -- note the premature there
Optimization of bandwidth-bound code is almost purely architectural in nature. Most of our software best practices date from a time when everything was computation-bound such that architecture could be ignored with few bad effects.
So a lot of code quality debates don’t matter for the typical enterprise app. While a dev spends their afternoon shaving off 100 nanoseconds in the hot path, a second developer on a deadline added a poorly thought out round trip that adds 800milliseconds.
This architectural problems are also more difficult to unwind later since they tend to have cascading effects.
There were fewer available layers of abstraction.
Whether you wrote in ASM, C, or Pascal, there was a lot less variance than writing in Rust, JavaScript, Python.
If you are building something with similar practical constraints for the Nth time this is definitely true.
You are inheriting “architecture” from your own memory and/or tools/dependencies that are already well fit to the problem area. The architectural performance/model problem already got a lot of thought.
Lots of problems are like that.
But if you are solving a problem where existing tools do a poor job, you better be thinking about performance with any new architecture.