I made a new character and world to try out some "creative mode" stuff, now that I've put a couple hundred hours into the game... decided i wanted to be able to see at night so I didn't have to wait until morning to continue building the basement, so I used the world-gen map to see where the trader was, and wandered over to the next island to buy the headlamp.
typed "spawn Coins 620 p" to be able to afford it, and watched "Spawned Coins" flash on the top-left of the screen for the next 10 minutes or so.

Apparently, the game spawns in items one at a time. At first, I assumed this would be an obvious target for optimization, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually intentional, in an attempt to make cheating painful.

... which, in all honesty, might be even dumber than failing to optimize. Cheaters gonna cheat... and with the wide availability of mods, there's no reason to use the obviously broken in-game tools to achieve their goals; it just makes it look like the devs can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.