Very likely that internally there were people who had an inkling this was going on, but could never convince product to devote time to put it in the backlog. This change is a win for that engineer.

This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to.