I don’t think people are saying compilation doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would consider C++ to be a language that is at the high performance end of the spectrum

I don’t think people are saying compilation doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would consider C++ to be a language that is at the high performance end of the spectrum. High performance languages, high level languages like C++, Rust, Ada, Haskell, Ocaml, And Swift have relatively long compile times but I would classify them as languages suitable for applications requiring high performance. Go is an interesting exception in that it produces pretty high performance results without long compile times. But you do have a point. Things are so much better now than when I started programming 50 years ago. Machines and languages are so much better. Programming is a dream compared to back then.