Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.
And can you give a number on the "vocal minority"? Because companies usually sell what customers want and if the majority of the phones on the market is big, then that's what people want.
I want my self-driving car to be a better driver than any human. Sure we can drive without LIDAR, but just look up the amount of accidents caused by humans.
We all should think about optimization and performance all the time and make a conscious decision of doing or not doing it given a time constraint and what level of performance we want.
People write bad-performing code not because it's easier, it's because they don't know how to do it better or don't care.
Repeating things like "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and "it's cheaper to get a bigger machine than dev time" are bad because people stop caring about it and stop doing it and, if we don't do it, it's always going to be a hard and time-consuming task.
Do you share a part of you charge with the people that contributed? If not, what you're doing is the same as what others did when they took your work and profited from it.
You've all agreed what can and can't be done with your code based on the license you used.
If you want to make money with software, it's proprietary or dual-licensed (A)GPL with CLA. Anything else you'll bait and switch on people.
As a backend dev, I love the technology. The problem is that you have to choose between a not-so-scalable solution (Server, signalR) or a minimum 2mb initial payload (WASM) that can easily go to 5mb.
Interested on how many concurrent users you have for Server to be a problem. Can you elaborate more on your performance issues?
Exactly. At least you have to show that you know what you're doing and it's deliberate. Depending on the seniority, I expect some kind of justification in the comments, like "it's O(nˆ2), but since the input will be very small, it's ok".
In real life people do a lot of O(nˆ2) code without realizing, and usually it's just some unnecessary loop inside another loop. I want to know that you care about some things.
Here you have selection bias. If you're a US company and you have to bring someone from outside the US, you'll probably bring the better ones and, as someone already said, if they are fluent in English, they are probably at the top.
Come work for a Brazilian company to see the that we have mediocre people everywhere.