The dancing required to stay within the happy paths, and the necessity of avoiding certain common abstractions in order to do so, leaves me convinced it must be

The dancing required to stay within the happy paths, and the necessity of avoiding certain common abstractions in order to do so, leaves me convinced it must be much easier to write performant high-level code in C, C++, Rust etc than in something like JavaScript or Python. While it's possible to write fast code in the latter, it doesn't seem like much fun.