The article itself illustrates this nonsense attitude by mentioning 60% latency drops but a) what does that translate in ms, b) were those savings relevant at all?

A cursory glance over the article leads to some references to P99 latencies dropping from around mid 20ms to around mid 10ms.

Those are irrelevant.

Does the 1% care if their requests take 10ms more to fulfill?

From the surface this sounds like meaningless micro-optimization. I'm glad someone got to promote themselves with this bullshit though.

Latencies add up. 1 end-user request may have lots of requests in the backend which run in serial… especially when they have “50,000 services.”