Well, half of a second is a small difference. So yeah, there will probably be better things to work on up to the point when you have people working exclusively on your site.
> This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.
But no, there are way more things broken on the web than lack of overoptimization.
> Most of us are aiming for under a half second total for response times.
I know people working on that exist. "Most of us" is absolutely not, if they were so many, the web wouldn't be like it's now.
Anyway, most people working towards instantaneous response aren't optimizing the very-high latency case where the article may eventually get a 0.5s slowdown. And almost nobody gets to the extremely low-gain kinds of optimizations there.
"More than 10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. In 2006, Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%."
> This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.
But no, there are way more things broken on the web than lack of overoptimization.