> there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who don’t know much
I think you mean “programmers” not just “web programmers”. I’ve worked with plenty of bloated over-engineered Java and C# codebases that take several minutes to start on a very fast developer machine with 32 gigs of RAM. Sometimes, the worst offenders use “lower level” languages! The performance averse problem is endemic in the entire field, not just in the web.
I think you mean “programmers” not just “web programmers”. I’ve worked with plenty of bloated over-engineered Java and C# codebases that take several minutes to start on a very fast developer machine with 32 gigs of RAM. Sometimes, the worst offenders use “lower level” languages! The performance averse problem is endemic in the entire field, not just in the web.