It's a statement of my experience in the performance achieved in practice by real developers who lack dedicated language support teams. And even the ones who enjoy dedicated language support teams. I could point to gRPC. gRPC-Java is slapping gRPC-C++ sideways. Why is that? Because when a codebase is increasingly complex, the C-style lifetime management becomes too difficult for developers to ponder, and they revert to relying on the slower features of the language platform, like reference counting smart pointers.
I think hybrid implementations, where a project enjoys the beneficial aspects of the language runtime at large, but delegates small, critical functions to other languages, makes sense. That keeps the C, C++, or Rust stuff contained to boundaries that are ponderable and doesn't let those language platforms dictate the overall architecture of the program.
If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.
You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.