That's to maintain parity with the example TFA gives. I'm not saying it's never worth it... Of course you'll optimize often repeated tasks, loops, etc.
Here's what TFA quotes as bad reasoning, because it makes fun of optimization effort in some cases:
"@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)"
Unlike TFA I agree with the twitting guy above that the efficiency improvement here wasn't worth it.