It's not a developer decision on Alpine where musl is the system allocator. Otherwise I fully agree, application developers are mainly responsible for the performance of their applications.
Using the system allocator is also a developer decision. They can use any custom allocator they want. A lot of programs use Jemalloc regardless of what the system allocator is.
> and musl’s allocator is garbage for any multithreaded program.
...it only matters if the threads allocate/free with such a high frequency that they run into contention, the C stdlib allocator is a shared resource and user code really shouldn't assume that the allocators fixes their poor design decisions for multithreaded code.
If other allocators are able to handle a situation perfectly well, even a general-purpose allocator like the one in glibc, that suggests that musl's is deficient.
AMD's threadrippers had 64 cores in 2020. The workstation targeted threadripper pro reaches 96. These are desktop parts, the top end of their server offering has 192 cores.