It's funny when developers themselves think effort is so fungible. Like if you spent 1 hour on A, then you would've also made 1 hour of progress on B, C, or D, and that it would've been worthwhile. To the point of fallacy in your post.
I would think developers have the experience to realize this isn't true but I see it all the time on these forums.
I think I'm making the opposite claim - effort isn't fungible (and availability of effort isn't fungible). You can't necessarily spend 1 hour that would otherwise go into, say, rewriting Mercurial into a compiled language and instead spend it on making CPython faster and get the same results. One of these is more likely to work, and also the two problems are going to attract interest from different people.
And one of the things that affects how productive one hour of work will be - and also whether random volunteers will even show up with one hour of work - is the likelihood of getting a change accepted and shipped to users. This is influenced by both the maintainers' fundamental openness to that sort of change, and any standards (influenced by the maintainers, who are in turn influenced by their users) about how careful a change must be to not make the project worse on other interesting standards of evaluation. It's also influenced by the number of people working on the project (network effects) because a more vibrant project is more likely to review your code promptly, finish a release, and get it into the hands of more users.
So I'm claiming that it's better to spend time on rewriting Mercurial in Rust than to spend time on getting CPython startup faster, because the Mercurial folks are actively interested in such contributions and the CPython folks are actively uninterested, and because there are fewer external constraints in making Mercurial startup faster than in making CPython startup faster. And I'm saying that the more we encourage folks to help with rewriting Mercurial in Rust, the more likely additional folks are to show up and help with the same project, thereby making 1 hour of effort even more productive.
I would think developers have the experience to realize this isn't true but I see it all the time on these forums.