I respect this argument but I'm curious as to how the smallness of a language would be beneficial to a developer, if the goal is to be able to rapidly build app

I respect this argument but I'm curious as to how the smallness of a language would be beneficial to a developer, if the goal is to be able to rapidly build applications which are still quite performant. C, when run on the same exact machine as Java, is only a few x faster in the best case scenario to my understanding. And as complexity of the application grows, there is a chance that you don't manage your memory properly, something which a garbage collected language usually does well enough. Couple in the rich libraries for both languages, I think I would still choose java unless I was writing an embedded system.