This entire post can be boiled down to this: pragmatism vs idealism. The author rightly points out that those running a business must make pragmatic decisions about on what employees spend their time. However, most of the time those same employees have never run their own business; they are not aware of the cost of their own employment. Those employees happily optimize single pixels in a massive image because it makes them feel good. They're not thinking about ROI, the likelihood that users will notice, etc.; they're thinking about targeting an ideal and feeling satisfied when they hit it. It's easy to justify that behavior by claiming that users notice, but at the author points out, sometimes they notice and don't care.