It’s kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize “premature optimization”, when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary.

I will forever be salty about that one time I blamed of premature optimization for pushing to optimize a code that was allocating memory faster than the GC could free it, which was causing one of the production servers to keep getting OOM crashes.

If urgent emails from one of the big clients who put the entire company into emergency mode during a holiday is still considered "premature", then no optimization is ever going to be mature.