It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U
Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?