Here’s a way better explanation of survivorship bias. If you correct this bias in your logic, you can say that the opposite of your title is true based on your observations. The fact that there is little to none profitable/valuable software optimized right from the start on the market, might mean that “(premature)? optimization” might indeed be ‘the root of all evil’ causing companies either still sit there optimizing unreleased code, or go down, not being able to turn enough profit for all the man-hours they lost ‘prematurely’ optimizing their product.