No, it's not actually better performance wise, unless you have some super deep hierarchies I'm your current project. What it's designed to do is to give the developer and nice easy way of creating their layout where someone else can come in at a later time and move things around without going through a messy conundrum that the original dev can't even work with anymore. With that said, inflating layouts is rarely your bottleneck nowadays, so performance isn't super crucial as maybe it used to be.

Damn, I need to get with the times. I didn't realize constraintlayout has been out for so long, too. Are these really significantly faster performance wise?

Build flexible layouts with FlexboxLayout