I presume that the title is a reference to DJB's talk "The death of optimizing compilers".

http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/audio.ogg

https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/slides-djb-20150416-a4.pdf

It’s a reference to a previous LWN article, “Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?”:

https://lwn.net/Articles/793253/