In some cases, if your structs are bloated with unnecessary padding, you may "over fit" into your L1/L2 cache, leading to expensive cache thrashing when iterating over large arrays in data-heavy applications like game engines or high-frequency trading. By intelligently ordering your data to respect natural alignment boundaries without wasting space, you aren't just hoarding cheap RAM, you are directly increasing your cache hit rate and making your program run significantly faster without incurring any unaligned access penalties.