I can not think of very many other disciplines rather than programming that not only span that number of orders of magnitude, but are doing engineering across the entire range

Our human brains are not very good at dealing with this. We do not have English terminology that can account for systems that span this range. Is something that takes 500 cycles “fast?” 50,000? 5 million? 50 million? To a human, all but perhaps that last one are equally “instant”. Then again, try to do them a billion times each and the differences become quite marked.

“Fast” and “slow” are often not very useful words in software engineering because of this broad range of orders of magnitude. Imagine trying to draw the line between “fast” and “slow” in some sort of general sense across 19 orders of magnitude, in a world that generally experiences performance in a very linear manner. You can’t.