Materials & Performance: Import Textures or create inside Unreal?

Hi All,

I was creating dynamic materials like looting bars / circular progress bars and radar pulse inside Unreal Engine, but got informed that you can reduce the number of nodes inside the material by using imported png textures.
While I deem myself capable of doing that, I was wondering which of the two approaches is better for performance? Creating a dynamic material from scratch or by using imported textures?

All thoughts are appreciated!

Coming back to this one:
Official Unreal Docs (UMG Best Practices in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation) [at the bottom under “Optimization”] state that you should always prefer textures to materials. This answers my question, but can anyone elaborate on that?