The meta would say that if people were optimally spending their time on things that matter to them. They don't. If they did bikeshedding wouldn't exist. It obviously does.
This is basically the same claim that economics can treat humans as perfectly rational actors perfectly rationally pursuing their perfectly rational goals. It is not a good model of humanity.
It's a revealed preference and there's a ton of economic studies about that vs stated preferences. You can say you don't care about tabs vs spaces all you want, but if you spend hours online talking about it, people are going to think you care, no matter what you say. Bringing economics into this, how do you metricize caring? Can you simplify it to be the time and money you put into a thing?
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
-G. Box
This is basically the same claim that economics can treat humans as perfectly rational actors perfectly rationally pursuing their perfectly rational goals. It is not a good model of humanity.