Do you care enough about better performance to recompile your Linux kernel? What are regular LTS, realtime, or low latency kernel?

I just noticed the article was written in 2007. A lot of new distro's like ubuntuu , or CentOS have a really streamlined kernels to start of with, if I remember it right, it will auto configure with known hardware configurations to optimize kernels as it installs in a fresh install. I think customizing a kernel helps in a lot of situations , but a bad kernel build can spell disaster. Thus why not that many fiddle with optimizing kernels to get and edge, especially now that hardware is so much better too