I don't know if most people find it more interesting or not. I do think there's value in both interests.
I also don't think that arguments against premature optimization are a dismissive attitude toward performance. Avoiding premature optimization is about picking your battles. In an ideal world, you could optimize everything.
But optimized code takes longer to write, and longer to maintain, and in this subideal world, we have limited time to spend on code. The point of avoiding premature optimization isn't to excuse low performance code. It's to give you time to optimize the code that makes the biggest difference.
I also don't think that arguments against premature optimization are a dismissive attitude toward performance. Avoiding premature optimization is about picking your battles. In an ideal world, you could optimize everything.
But optimized code takes longer to write, and longer to maintain, and in this subideal world, we have limited time to spend on code. The point of avoiding premature optimization isn't to excuse low performance code. It's to give you time to optimize the code that makes the biggest difference.