If a decent portion of your audience literally cannot even play the game because its performance is too bad or it can't run on their hardware, then that immediately affects your bottom line. And at least until recently, you couldn't really push fixes for it once the game was delivered. And so I think at least a little bit of that mindfullness for performance has carried over to the modern day, though I will say that I do think that performance optimization does seem to subjectively be getting worse even in gaming.
In web dev, while it is true that it affects your bottom line, it's a little bit less obvious. And in the eyes of most management teams that's always something that can be prioritized later since you could always update it after you shipped a feature. Also, there was very much a culture of "the browser will handle it."
Not to mention, most devs are using the hardware that is many times better than their consumers.
There is a small, but very vocal group that complain about 30 vs 60fps, and yet there are games that push for 120/240 on consumer hardware (valorant and overwatch both run at very high frame rates on very low specs). As I said, it’s about prioritising it. _Why_ it’s being prioritised doesn’t really matter.
> also there was very much a culture of “the browser will handle it”
That is very clearly still the culture.
> most devs are using the hardware that is many times better than their consumers.
My last work PC was a 32 core 4GHz machine with 256GB RAM, a 4090, and 16TB of NVMe SSD’s with 10GB fibre. Our target platform was 9GB RAM, and an 8 core 1.1GHz processor, yet we still managed (just about).