I might have generalized a bit too much. Of course some individual devs love the challenge of getting better performance out of anything.

But not enough of them that every dev company has an army of good developers who know how to do this with the expertise they are needing performance for. Theres a lot of ways one dev can specialize: gpu api (directx/opengl/vulcan/etc), os, game engine, disk access, database queries. One who knows graphic api well might not know how to optimize database queries. It doesnt help throwing money at the problem either, those who know this stuff usually already have good jobs. So you might have no choice than to use the devs you have, and the money you have budgeted, to release the game within contracted time.