You are right, i think that Python is trying to be as expressive and succinct as possible. A runtime like pypy is very difficult to change, and it would therefore make it much more difficult to evolve the language.

Luckily „Faster CPython” is now a thing and even Guido participates in it.

Reasoning given for course correction was (AFAIR) that Python really could be faster for things like data science or ML.