In https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm/blob/main/docs/STORAGE_KEYS.md you can see the standard storage key encoding used in CosmWasm from 2020-2023. In the meantime we figured out that using short keys is important for the performance of the underlying database. How much it affects performance, I don't know. But the more I learn about how those databases and their caching works, the more I'm convinced this is the right direction.
CosmWasm developers love performance. It allows them to build things that are hard or impossible to build in other systems. We want to make it easy for our developers to reach peak performance.