Some products such as Hero/Cinematic detailed hair may already have the mesh resolution to be flexible and enabling soft cloth will simply lower performance.

I've seen some posts whereby 50k is considered common but more sophisticated hair can be up to 200k

Maybe by selecting Hair in the physics tab the hair presets already ignores subdivision????

If yes this would be very important information to know because we could create custom characters/creatures with more resolution in specific areas rather than forcing the entire character to be subdivided several times for soft body physics.

There should be a "physics" tag in the list for creating feedback.