Any interview involving data structures and algorithms will certainly expect you to be able to categorize the big O of your solution in both space and time. Your interviewer will probably also challenge you to at least speculate on how you could improve on the big O if needed. What is that about if not writing performant code?
If you consider “write code that doesn’t timeout or OOM on pathological inputs” to be writing performant code, sure.
But as it is normally understood, writing performant code is more about writing for fast performance with low time constant on everyday small inputs - something which algorithms and data structures interviews never touch on. Big O complexity is not directly related to performance, except for pathological inputs.
