Prometheus 2.0 provides significantly improved performance for highly dynamic environments like Kubernetes with a brand new storage engine. It offers around 3x reduction in CPU usage, 2x less disk space usage, and 100x reduction in I/O compared to previous versions. Additionally, Prometheus 2.0 handles target staleness differently by stopping returning values after a single scrape interval if a target goes down, rather than continuing for 5 minutes, making it simpler to understand.