My team and I have been using Python for web, scripting, and ETL development since 2007. I don't recall the last time Python wasn't "fast enough" for anything I needed to do. I'm sure it's legitimately too slow for plenty of use cases and classes of programming domains. But for a general purpose language that makes our developers incredibly productive (which is what we optimize for organizationally), I've not "often" found the point where it becomes bothersome. On the contrary, I'd say I've rarely found it. And in those cases, the workaround to make it fast enough is there.

That's not to dispute your experience. I just want to provide a counter example.