The performance of python indicates otherwise. There are some performance critical libraries written in C or C++ but a lot of python is written in python.

Python in itself is poorly suited to ever become performant as it lacks the types required. I imagine that causes some issues for effective jit-ing too.

They had a chance to fix this when adding type annotations, but instead of making it "optional/gradual typing" they opted to make it "documentation or linting support", which is obviously the wrong choice, but there were cultural reasons