Because it's not really doing anything with performance, it's just taking spaghetti code and god knows what else and using more resources to deal with it. To me performance is to have efficient code that uses as little resources as needed.
What I find scary is that software is being rushed, or written by folks who should never touch a computer so the programs require more and more resources with no end in sight. This is bad, it should not take 10% cpu/gpu and 200mb to run Tetris, or pacman :)
Fixing performance for me is fixing the spaghetti code, fine tuning that code to the point that you have done the best that you can, then if you need more resources it makes sense. Not write crap code and who cares about the resources, after hardware is cheap. I think that's the wrong attitude to have.