The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Oh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
C API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
I'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
