What you said is true, but it doesn't make what I said untrue. It could be that 99% of the statements are executed by shell builtins. But for essentially any

What you said is true, but it doesn't make what I said untrue. It could be that 99% of the statements are executed by shell builtins. But for essentially any shell script I've seen, speeding those up by 10x won't make any difference, because the real work is invoking compilers, linkers, invoking curl, tar, gzip, etc. As well as simple process creation overhead.