Something I've noticed about performance work is that people really want there to be A Cause for improvements. A new technology, something old no longer holding things back, "removing the debug logging", etc…

The truth of the matter is that 97% of the time the enabling thing for performance work is engineers having time in the schedule to sit down with the tools (usually a sampling profiler) and grind out small wins over and over.

There's no magic bullet that replaces good engineering.