Even if you're a great developer, you might not be getting paid to care about performance. If "loads fast" is not a deliverable your employer cares about, they are not going to give you the time or budget to care about performance. Think of how many websites, especially for marketing purposes, are built by contractors who are getting tasked with making shiny, asset heavy websites that look good on the nice macbooks of businesses paying them. I've never seen a heard a client say "oh and make sure the page loads in under 2s" to be honest.
When you're talking about code written for hire, you have to separate the developer's priorities/cares from the company's. There are many, MANY companies that do not care about performance or quality, where good enough means "At least won't actively enrage customers." These companies sometimes hire individual developers who do care about performance and quality. But if you're Third Developer From The Left on Project 123, what you personally care about is irrelevant.
This is one of the reasons I got out of actually writing software as a profession. My interests as a developer rarely aligned with my employers' business goals. I got tired of the whole "Cram features as fast as you can, quality be damned" mode of development and bailed.
Still in software, but I've been bouncing back and forth between product management and project management. I feel these roles (esp. Product) better allow one to "set the tone" on the priorities, compared to the individual engineer role. I can focus on what is the business case for undertaking engineering activities, manage risk, and help management balance features vs. quality. Suits me better. If I want to code I do it at home on my personal projects 100% on my own terms.
Yes, thank you. I suspect all of these people complaining about the size of web pages don't actually work as web developers. Especially because they think the only aspect of performance that matters is payload size.
