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While I agree with most of what you say, I have a personal anecdote that highlights the importance of performance as a feature.
I have a friend that studies economics and uses python for his day to day. Since computer science is not his domain, he finds it difficult to optimize his code, and learning a new language (C in this case) is not really an option.
Some of his experiments take days to run, and this is becoming a major bottleneck in his workflow. Being able to write faster code without relying on C is going to have a significant impact on his research.
Of course, there are other ways to achieve similar results, for example another friend is working on DIAS a framework that optimizes pandas in the runtime. But, the point still stands, there are a tonne of researchers relying on python to get quick and dirty results, and performance plays a significant in that when the load of data is huge.
I am definitely guilt for that, but I find this approach really productive. We use small bug fixes as an opportunity to improve the code quality. Bigger PRs often introduce new features and take a lot of time, you know the other person is tired and needs to move on, so we focus on the bigger picture, requesting changes only if there is a bug or an important structural issue.