The vast majority of time spent building software has little to do with optimization. Sky-high abstracted brain rot languages are useful precisely because usually you don’t need to worry about the type of details that you would if you were optimizing performance
And then if you are optimizing for performance, you can make an incredible amount of progress just fixing the crappy Java etc code before you need to drop down a layer of abstraction
Even hedge funds, which make money executing trades fractions of milliseconds quicker than others, use higher level languages and fix performance issues within those languages if needed
My assertion is that this is a very bad thing. This is why we have electron and pay Amazon $900/mo to host what should be a static website on a Pentium 4.
Since optimization is not a concern, waste is not a concern. Sure, send the user a 200MB JavaScript blob for the visit counter, who cares?
AT&T's billing website bounces you back and forth between four different domains where each downloads 50MB of scripts to redirect you to the next before landing on what looks like a Flash app from 2008. Takes five minutes to get my invoice because nothing matters. God alone knows how much it costs them to serve all of that garbage, probably millions.
This is a bad way to make software. It's not even a good way to make bad software.
The brain rot is the disconnect between the software and reality. The reality is that software has to run somewhere and it costs someone real money per unit resource. You can either make good software that consumes fewer resources or bad software that wastes everyone else's time and money. But hey, as long as you ship on time and get that promotion who cares, right?
And then if you are optimizing for performance, you can make an incredible amount of progress just fixing the crappy Java etc code before you need to drop down a layer of abstraction
Even hedge funds, which make money executing trades fractions of milliseconds quicker than others, use higher level languages and fix performance issues within those languages if needed