The real disconnect is that the user doesn't really care all that much. It's mostly the designers who care. And Qt for example but also WPF let you style components almost to unrecognizable and unusable results. So if everyone will need to make do with 8GB for the foreseeable future, designers might just be told "No.", which admittedly will be a big shock to some of them. Or maybe someone finally figures out how to do HTML+CSS in a couple of megabytes.
Because the why can be completely unrelated to the code (odd business requirements etc). The code can be known to be non-optimal but it is still the correct way because the embedded system used in product XYZ has some dumb chip in it that needs it this weird way etc. Or the CEO loves this way of doing things and fires everyone who touches it. So many possibilities, most technical projects have a huge amount of politics and weird legacy behavior that someone depends on (including on internal stuff, private methods are not guaranteed to not be used by a client for example). And comments can guard against it, both for the dev and the reviewer. Hell we currently have clients depend on the exact internal layout of some PDF reports, and not even the rendered layout but that actual definitions.
No, they will point out that the way to make GCC better is not really in the code itself. It's in scientific paper writing and new approaches. Implementation is really not the most work.
The difference is visibility, with a van you can often see as close as 1,5 m in front of you due to the short hood. The problem is a lot of the newer trucks and SUVs are so tall that a full child (or 5) just disappear in front the car.
Wouldn't that intern just use an NLE (be it Premiere, Davinci Resole etc) anyway? If you need to style subtitles and edit shorts and video content, you'll need a proper editor anyway.
So this is a good thing even for coreutils itself, they will slowly find all of these untested bits and specify behaviour more clearly and add tests (hopefully).
There are some neat tricks to remove almost all the pack and unpack time. Apache Arrow can help a ton there (uses the same data format on both CPU and GPU or other accelerator). And on some unified memory systems even the send time can be very low.