[esprehn]

Those verbs (reduced, decreased, increased) all assume the situation was "bad" already. Avoiding that in the initial design is what's poorly rewarded.

Building a system that's fast on day one will not usually be rewarded as well as building a slow system and making it 80% faster.

[bagacrap]

Yes, and ironically there are promotion ladders that explicitly call out "staff engineers identify problems before they become an issue". But we all know that in reality no manager-leader is ever going to fix problems eagerly, if they even agree with someone's prediction that that thing is really going to become a problem.