There's always this rift between the "language is slow" crowd and the "but it's not the bottleneck" crowd. I think this comes from the types of applications you work on and their scale.

I work at what a company that's not particularly large. Our original API is a Django monolith that serves about 1000req/s.

While you could argue Python isn't the bottleneck, Django often is. I hear the same feedback from colleagues that work in Rails. Not only do we run into issues with latency per request but we have to run a significant number of Kubernetes pods to serve this workload. With c#, golang, java or a similar language we would only require a handful of pods and drastically cut our compute costs.

Even for web workloads, these slow interpreted languages and their developer experience optimized frameworks absolutely do become a bottleneck and claiming they don't (or that you need to be at Google/Facebook scale before they do) is false.

Everything is a tradeoff but the way I think of it: speed is a feature.

You're literally the exact person I'm talking about. No serious application developer who's interested in speed is working in Ruby. This isn't my opinion. I don't care personally, it's just a fact if you care about reality. When Netflix announces that they use Ruby because it performs faster than Node.js, I'll change my opinion, because my opinion is based on facts and not feelings. I didn't make Ruby, so whether it does well or fails isn't personally important to me. If Ruby was the fastest interpreter, I'd be pro-Ruby but it absolutely isn't and pretending it is is depressing and shows you are making political or selfish decisions, not practical ones.

Python might be popular but developer happiness isn't a concept I'd associate with the language. There's no joy in being limited to single statements in lambdas, for example.

Python is somewhat pleasure. Ruby might as well be sandscript as far as I'm concerned. The use of pipes is gross, uncoordinated and lacking direction.