[ratww]

The performance advantages of ECS are a bit of a red herring. There's not much of a tradeoff when it comes to speed of iteration.

The origins of ECS are in the work of Scott Bilas and Adam Martin, who weren't seeking performance improvements, but rather a way to allow non-technical teammates to iterate faster. This thing was revolutionary in the late 90s/early 2000s because suddenly you didn't need an army of increasingly expensive programmers just to get simple things done.

The performance boost was discovered much later when people found out that ECS could naturally benefit from data-oriented design. Performance is a nice-to-have but is far from being the raison d'être of ECS. It still makes sense to to have ECS or EC (or even just non-inheritance-component-based, like Unity) without the performance advantages of data-oriented design.

[pjmlp]

ECS like systems were well known in CS even before that.

"Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming", 1998

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201178885