Because when it is to actually get paid work done, all the bloat adds up and that 3 days upfront could shave weeks/months of your yearly tasks. XKCD has a topic abut how much time you can spend on a problem before effort outweighs productivity gains. If the tasks are daily or hourly you can actually spend a lot of time automating for payback

And note this is one instance of task, imagine a team of people all using your code to do the task, and you get a quicker ROI or you can multiply dev time by people

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

You can write perfectly well structured and maintainable code in Python and still be more productive than in other languages.

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 hours ago

That also goes to show why to not waste 3 days to shave 2 seconds off a program that gets run once a week.