I am pretty certain that if you stripped away most of the abstractions (law of leaky abstractions) and wrote software that was optimized to the hardware design

I am pretty certain that if you stripped away most of the abstractions (law of leaky abstractions) and wrote software that was optimized to the hardware design per se, then you be able to write software that is blazingly fast. Look up how many steps your favorite language is going through before hitting the cpu. No wonder shit is slow when all we do is stacking abstractions and not concentrating on removing them.