Noooo! Easy performance changes should go ASAP as part of a one-off release. I don’t see why the low risk performance improvements should wait. Before someone is like “but nothing is low risk”: that is not true. Adding an index is an example of a performance optimization that has high reward and low risk.
I understand the thinking here, unfortunately releases in general require a lot more attention than people may suspect. Performance changes are merged into our main development branch with other development changes, many which are directly tied to performance gains, like skill changes, level changes, shader changes, you name it. To release we also have to take the QA team and growing build and release team off what they’re doing. We also have to have the social and marketing team draft patch notes, have them reviewed by game design and others, and post them everywhere and we have to follow up by monitoring for any issues that are accidentally released which then activates quite a lot of other procedures. Unfortunately, any release does entail quite a lot of effort that directly takes time from other progress. Hopefully that sheds some light! I remember being on the other side and wondering what the heck those silly devs on other games were thinking haha