[arp242]

I would assume that performance wasn't the prime concern, but rather the accuracy/appearance of the generated image. Most people aren't putting this in their shell startup, just as most people aren't putting an ffmpeg encode command in their shell startup.

And I would assume neofetch is relatively slow because getting some of the system information is relatively slow. e.g. to get the GPU name it does "lspci -mm":

  % time lspci -mm >/dev/null
  lspci -mm > /dev/null  0.03s user 0.03s system 2% cpu 2.993 total
  % time lspci -mm >/dev/null
  lspci -mm > /dev/null  0.03s user 0.01s system 76% cpu 0.053 total

Guess it's faster that second time due to kernel cache or whatnot, but 50ms is still fairly slow. And that's only the GPU.