> Such optimizations as those described in the article make sense only in a handful of situations, and using them must not be a light-heart decision, because their cost is big.

This is really not true. Inheritance is not only slow it is needlessly complicated. It introduces dependencies and indirection while gaining nothing.

People who have never programmed before think having a car class inherit from a vehicle class makes sense. Eventually they realize that what they have are arrays of positions and velocities that they need to combine. That could be multiple files with lots of boiler plate nonsense or it could be a single loop.

> I fully agree with going all in when it makes sense, but we all know what is the root of all evil.

If you are implying optimization, you should realize that that quote comes from someone telling his students not to noodle the tiniest details like post or pre increment in their for loops to get the compiler to output one less instruction when their program isn't even done yet.

If you want modern software to run fast, you need to architect for it first. Then you can make things work, then you can profile and optimize. This idea that there are no consequences to the early design decisions you make is a gross distortion of the context of this quote.