If there was sufficient interest in it, most performance issues could be solved. Look at Python or Javascript, big companies have financial interest in it so they've poured an insane amount of capital into making them faster.
Being slower than other mainstream languages isn't really a problem in and of itself if it's fast enough to get the job done. Looking at all the ML and LLM work that's done in Python, I would say it is fast enough to get things done.
