I know you're confident & being playful, but I figured I could add a fun story:

Chrome is multiprocess. Debugging that is tedious. We have a special command line param to not kill hung processes (since we're stepping through). And debug info is huge.

Often, a bunch of prints are just far easier.

In Super Mario World, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Chrono Trigger you get a little show of all the places you visited and people you helped. You see how the world is better because of your actions.

I feel like that is the best way to do it and stay in budget?

Ah. Right.
It depends on what our definition of "is" is.
I see.

He documented each major change and how much slower and uglier the code was each time.

Displaying the dictionary, part 1: Naive version - The Old New Thing share.google/OIXkKFW3BPGr...

Raymond Chen was asked to write a program that translates from say English to Chinese in C++.

They compared its speed to the naive C$ implementation, which was much faster.

Raymond then updated several times, abandoning std::string etc for performance.

It was hard to beat naive C# performance.

tl;dr for PNG updates:
- parallel (de)compression, big yes
- other compressors, likely
- lossy PNG, research needed but idea supported

Oh man, I'm loving these stories! Thank you