This is nonsense, there is boatloads of frameworks and CMSes which can easily run into the 10s or 100s of milliseconds for the main request ( WP for example ).

This is nonsense, there is boatloads of frameworks and CMSes which can easily run into the 10s or 100s of milliseconds for the main request ( WP for example ). Serving only 20 users only has to do with how many workers were assigned. I actually implemented a high traffic RoR payment provider on minimal infra ( 1 small VPS ), and benchmarked a couple of Python CMSes and compared them to WP.