When I was starting out using the web, one of the reasons for using Google over competition was that it was fast. The home page loaded fairly quickly, and the results were instantaneous. Google spent a lot of time optimizing for performance during its early years and they were explicit about it.
The problem with this argument is that there are many contradicting sample points. Like chrome.
On one hand, Google created the JS-Engine V8 which finally made the web fast. But on the other hand, did nothing to fix the RAM issues that came with that until recent years.
So I see it as "Let's do performance only when it's an advantage for us". Which all of the OP examples falls to. OP want to conclude from that that performance=advantage so everyone need to work on it all the time (because who will ignore advantages?), but all we see is if(performance=advantage){refactor}. Which does not support his conclusion.
Example cases are startups, monopoles, high cost (like refactoring bank code) etc. which have other silos of advantage.
