If anything I'd argue we see the opposite. Billions of cycles are wasted through abstraction vs the few that do actual work. You'll see this profiling any mod

If anything I'd argue we see the opposite. Billions of cycles are wasted through abstraction vs the few that do actual work. You'll see this profiling any modern application; extra copying, useless computation and other ills abound. Copying data and computing things "just in case" make the software much easier to modify. But it is not a good way to maximize "speed related metrics".