So you're saying that going for the less performant option when it's not needed is "better code"? if anything the modern day developer disregards performance in order to speed up the development process. Prime example being object oriented languages which are bloating up memory with irrelevant/unused meta data for their objects. Other than that most modern day developers lack a lot of knowledge about how the system on which their software operates actually works, or how the program itself actually works in memory. it's the machine code that the compiler/interpreter converts the code into that's being ran, not the source code.

And if choosing the option with the highest performance is "absurd" then maybe reconsider whether your code is that good :)