Plumbers build all the pipes, but one of the aforementioned professional engineers created a drawing of where they would go and how the water and sewage would move through the building.
Crypto has been the bad place for almost 10 years. It lost it's shot at being mainstream when Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin payments due to price instability.
Seeing what you made get to the point that that's an issue is a "a good problem". Yes, it's worth it to optimize at that point, but that's still an argument for what I consider premature optimization.
As someone that's a senior at a large corp, I absolutely do not want someone making the codebase more complex with the only benefit being being that it's now barely measurably faster. Especially when there are probably better things to be spending time on (spoiler, there are). Unless you're knocking like 20% off a very impactful metric, or addressing a looming scaling probably, go find something better to do than making tiny algorithm optimizations.
It's still about getting users even if you're not charging money for it. If you want to make an open source thing and don't care about getting users then that's great for you I guess? And there's a good chance it'll stay that way unless you put at least some effort into getting them (eg even putting effort into a readme counts).