The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
That's... quite the choice of words there
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.