Seems a well balanced discussion. I think people are generalising too much when they make statements pro and against Clean Code practices. They take their context and make universally true affirmations. The context will always drive the conversation. Will you use clean code when programming micro-controllers or OS kernels or games? Probably not. Your focus is somewhere else. But for the 90+% of use cases, those practices will give other benefits which are more valuable, like better maintainability, extensibility, etc. When you start from "let's built an Electron app for example", performance is for sure not your main concern.