That article compares ASICs. Companies that design ASICs buy microarchitecture licenses, not ASICs. There are available RISC-V microarchitectures for licensin

That article compares ASICs. Companies that design ASICs buy microarchitecture licenses, not ASICs. There are available RISC-V microarchitectures for licensing that aren't what I'd call slow. e.g. SiFive's P870 isn't slow. Tenstorrent Ascalon (which LG licensed for its smart TVs) is no sloth either. There's a solid 3 year from the time a microarchitecture is made available for licensing, and the time the riffraff can buy boards based on the resulting chips. This has been consistently true, ARM and RISC-V alike. Thus, increasingly faster microarchitectures are being made available, and the chips using them will continue to come. The ones we have now, are of course the ones based on microarchitectures that were made available 3+ year ago.