It is indeed a very good argument, but I understand that is not rare that developers downplay the value of readability, as this is a very hard-to-measure value, unlike performance. Readability impacts subtly but surely in time of development, team motivation and even in the ability to optimise code. For whoever may be interested, I recommend Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) and Martin Fowler presentations.

With this said, I agree that it would be nice to have some performance comparisons, I bet this would be another argument against reduce.