That skill set is helpful, but you can go a long way with profiling tools to find what's your bottleneck is spending the most time on, and try to do less of that. And, in general, trying to work with the least amount of abstraction amd making sure the abstractions you use match the underlying reality as much as possible. Almost always, you can't add a layer to get performance, just like you can't usually add a layer to get code quality, and you can't usually add a layer to get security.

Obviously, abstractions are useful, but it can be very hard to dig out of wrong abstractions, when they've influenced the design of the whole project.