I have some experience with codegolfing for speed and in my experience, these benchmarks do not reflect the reality of such problems, either. If you really want to tweak code for speed, you'll use a mix of algorithmic improvements (that's where the biggest gains are) tailored to your language and compiler/hardware, possibly using FFI/assembly if you absolutely need it. But the benchmark game explicitly disallows algorithmic improvements, for example. Except through the backdoor, where language implementors can sometimes tweak libraries to circumvent restrictions.

And to make things more complicated, the performance increase is generally a function of the time spent on optimizing the problem, which is dependent not only on any innate speed, but also the expressiveness of the language and the programmer's familiarity with the language. Given that you don't have infinite time, there are further tradeoffs here.