Calls to Joomla\CMS\HTML\HTMLHelper::date() (or Joomla\CMS\HTML\HTMLHelper::_('date') if you're Doing It Right) can be somewhat expensive because it always calls Joomla\CMS\Factory::getUser() which causes a read action from the session API. This method is used quite liberally to format date/time strings to a desired timezone, so it should be a performant method to the best of our ability. Additionally, it's quite a bit of overhead if you don't need to convert timezones on a date/time string. So, there are a couple of actionable points with this issue:

First, there is only one code path that requires a call to Joomla\CMS\Factory::getUser() so we shouldn't make that call every time the method is executed.

Second, we should review the core uses of this method and depending on the use case decide if:

• We can specify a timezone for use or avoid use of the method at all (versus localizing the date/time string)
• We actually need a translatable date/time string or a standardized format can be used

Right now, this code snippet is massively more performant (and performance matters a lot in places like the action logs exports, as many recent issues have shown, not to mention the method is normally used in all layouts where date/time strings are displayed to users, so it gets used quite frequently):

use Joomla\CMS\Date\Date;
use Joomla\CMS\HTML\HTMLHelper;
use Joomla\CMS\Language\Text;

// This ...
$date = new Date($time, new \DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$date->format(Text::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC6'));

// ... is roughly equivalent to ...
HTMLHelper::_('date', $time, Text::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC6'), 'UTC');

// ... but without the performance overhead.