I don't believe that my argument fell into the "false dichotomy" trap. The point I tried to make was that I don't think that there's ever a good point in the software development process where it makes sense to ignore performance altogether. I think that a holistic approach makes much more sense.
My argument was not a straw man. The original author specifically said that he, during a specific part of his development process, "[...] was not thinking about performance, about the efficiency of what I [he] wrote, at all [...]". I understand that he circled back on the performance issue later, but in my view, it makes more sense to start with an integrated performance/readability approach than to achieve both in multiple passes.
My argument was not a straw man. The original author specifically said that he, during a specific part of his development process, "[...] was not thinking about performance, about the efficiency of what I [he] wrote, at all [...]". I understand that he circled back on the performance issue later, but in my view, it makes more sense to start with an integrated performance/readability approach than to achieve both in multiple passes.