I disagree. I believe the majority of code is slow because it's written without any consideration at all to performance. I like Casey Muratori's philosophy of non-pessimization where true optmization (measuring, working hot spots) is rare and rarely necessary but massive speedups compared to the general state of the art are achievable by simply not writing code using patterns that are inherently slow. This isn't deep algorithmic stuff it's just avoiding copies and/or pointer chasing.
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8 <- Casey's most recent intro to non-pessimization
> For a realistic-sized problem, if you write solutions in C and Python with the same amount of effort from equally skilled programmers, the Python version will almost certainly be faster
The Advent of Code runs every year and I'm not sure about C (not something I track) but there are plenty of Rust submissions and while the Rust submissions take longer to come in, it's not THAT much longer. From memory it's like 2x on a timescale of minutes. The Python programs are not faster.