After watching an inspiring video on terminal optimization [1], I started doing some napkin math on how fast my ex-employers' programs "should" run and how many resources they "should" take up.
With my very small sample size (N=5), those numbers definitely hold. My big untested assumption is that most startups have even worse codebases than what I've experienced in my short tenure haha. I'd be curious what an "average" startup could achieve in 6 weeks.
A thousandfold speedup means going from 1 second to 1 ms. A hundred fold reduction in size means going from a million lines to 10,000 lines.
I'm sure you can find examples where that's possible, but as a general claim, it's utterly implausible.