Back in the days of 8080 CPUs, I built a number of projects in Forth,including a "discovery system" which adapted patterns from the late Douglas Lenat's Eurisko project, as well as a trading system which, on paper, could have been successful.
From that experience, I tend to agree with your intuitions.
Now that we have 64-bit CPUs, it's tempting to revisit Forth. What might be missing is he massive collection of libraries we have in other languages.
Forth, BTW, historically, has been pushed directly to Silicon in at least two instances, the first one by Chuck Moore [1], the second one designed by Philip Koopman [2]
"forth chip" now gives pretty good google.