There's a somewhat tangentially related heuristic to your points imho. When writing code, when in doubt, task CPU over memory, it will generally yield leaner, better software. Easier to profile, debug, and optimize. Much easier to scale in production environments too.

Code which optimizes for fast running time, tends to lean heavily into using memory-bloating data structures and caches. These are often poison for aggregate performance in real world environments, and like you said among other things, reduce visibility in the workings of system.

There's some implications of this stance; e.g. optimizations to reduce memory footprint are generally never wasted, while optimizations to squeeze out a few ns of runtime may have many more unexpected consequences.