I have a very similar experience, but with a different profiling tool. When I first graduated from school and joined a big internet company, I'm not that "different". The serving stack was all in C++. My colleagues were really capable but not that into "tools", they'd rather depend on themselves (guess, tune, measure).

But I, as a fresh member in the team, learned and introduced Google perftools to the team and did a presentation of the breakdown of the running time of the big binary. I have to say that presentation was a life-changing moment in my career.

So together with you, I really want to thank those who devoted heavily into building these tools. When I was doing the presentation, I really felt standing on the shoulders of giants and those giants were helping me.

And over years, I used more and more tools like valgrind, pahole, asan, tsan.

Much appreciated!