No, the paper showed that use of a particular ecosystem default in c++ led to algorithmically worse performance then use of an ecosystem default in python. You

No, the paper showed that use of a particular ecosystem default in c++ led to algorithmically worse performance then use of an ecosystem default in python. You can always beat c if c happens to implement a bad enough algorithm and your n is large enough. That's no guarantee that the performance ∆ will continue to hold once the two language implement the same algorithm.