This drives me nuts too and your comment is justified.

Recently encountered someone going 'full crab' with rust & vk trying to chase perf, they were not happy when some thoughtfully written modern JS beat the brakes off it even with the overhead of the browser (~2000fps vs 750)

This kind of thoughtless "its rust!!!" shit causes people who don't know better to waste time chasing their tails. Claude seems to encourage it :\