Python is glue, used to call and integrate other faster languages. Most of what is done with Python is calling fast C and C++ code.

Back in ancient times, a software project I was working in, failed, precisely because of Python performance with the Zope framework, it was too slow to render a webpage that required more than a few interesting calculations.

Today the language is almost the same, but computers have a thousand times more memory, and the CPUs are similarly faster.

The exact same project would have been successful today, just like neural networks are cornerstones of modern computing, because of the advances in hardware.