Creating benchmarks to showcase speed and improvement over time

Description

Attempting to start discussion around benchmarking performance for various features across different environments/hardware. I see this as an easy way to deter naysayers, communicate performance improvements/progress, highlight areas in the need of the most optimization, etc.

I'd be happy to get something started, but was hoping for a minimal amount of guidance/direction before diving in so that an eventual PR has a higher chance of being pulled in.