Thanks for citing that one! Performance is indeed a feature, even today.
I think the way to deal with it is to keep performance top of mind for developers as they build so it isn't forgotten -- we do this in Discourse by having mini-profiler show page timings on every load. So if you get bad numbers, they are angry and red in the upper right corner of the page, and any developer can cite that with a link to drill into problem areas, either in the database or in the server-side code.
We actually use an evolution of our original .NET mini-profiler in Discourse:
miniprofiler.com
I highly recommend integrating performance tools into the daily work of your team. It delivers results!