The title immediately brings to mind the Osterhout classic, "Always Measure One Level Deeper", [1], and I imagine was probably inspired by it. Also worth revisiting.
I was not actually aware of the paper, and it is indeed pure gold, thanks for linking it. It is _also_ extremely timely, as with my current project (TigerBeetle), we are exactly at the point of transition from first-principles back-of-the-envelope performance architecture to measurement-driven performance engineering, and all the advice here is directly applicable!
[1]: https://cacm.acm.org/research/always-measure-one-level-deepe...