> It often sounds like they enjoy having all these footguns they refuse to fix, so they can feel superior and differentiate their club of greybeards who have memorised all the esoteric pitfalls, simply because they were along for the journey, from the masses.
Often the reason for these pitfalls is that they exist because they enable some performance optimizations. The respective maintainer does care about performance.
Intel, AMD and Apple would very likely be willing to invest an insane amount of money for a 10 % performance increase. So, if this indeed increases the performance by about 10 %, I'd call it a very good idea.
Ah, I meant something entirely different: that somebody looking like a jerk because there's ugly code that is very necessary for good performance... is likely true for only 10% of the time.
I'd wager the other 90% are OSS maintainers being jerks. Occam's Razor and all that.
Often the reason for these pitfalls is that they exist because they enable some performance optimizations. The respective maintainer does care about performance.