I love this story.

The citizens of Schilda possessed a horse with whose feats of strength they were highly pleased and against which they had only one objection — that it consumed such a large quantity of expensive oats. They determined to break it of this bad habit very gently, by reducing its ration by a few stalks every day, till they had accustomed it to complete abstinence. For a time things went excellently: the horse was weaned to the point of eating only one stalk a day, and on the succeeding day it was at length to work without any oats at all. On the morning of that day the spiteful animal was found dead; and the citizens of Schilda could not make out what it had died of.

— Anonymous, German folklore parable, as retold by Sigmund Freud in The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis and during his concluding lecture at Clark University in 1910.

That parable has so many possible interpretations, but my favorite one is that any optimization has its limits.

You can optimize resources in order to save money. You can optimize a process so it becomes faster or has the quality of its output improved. You can optimize your text so it becomes more legible or clearer.

But exceed it a bit and an essential resource might start lacking. Exceed it and the process stalls or outputs defective items instead. Clear too much of the text you're writing and its sense disappears, its message isn't put across.

Knowing when reducing the horse's ration is already enough is a challenge. And one needs to take care so no one starves in the process.