AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.
Imperative code has nothing to do with any of that.
Modern frameworks like React and its ilk make up 99% of the overhead and inefficiency of modern web code, and that is all declarative boilerplate. Things that should be one imperative line of code operating on a single html element turn into complete recomputing of every element in a thousand element DOM triggered not by direct invocation, but a global state change.