The answer is you build a team that builds tools to make optimization easier for everyone in the engineering organization. One individual team can't optimize every application, but if you make it easy for every engineering team to profile their applications and debug performance problems, you've enabled every team to continuously optimize the low-hanging fruit. In effect, you're no longer solving one-off 8-figure problems, you're optimizing the time of other engineers which is something that pays off in perpetuity.
Good large engineering organizations have these teams, and understand their value. For smaller companies, it's not as clear if you can reasonably fund a team for that kind of work.
Good large engineering organizations have these teams, and understand their value. For smaller companies, it's not as clear if you can reasonably fund a team for that kind of work.