What track record does GvR have in terms of speeding up CPython? He did not care for 3 decades (which is a defensible position given C extensions) and has been literally called "the boat anchor" by another HN member many times.

Mypy was Jukka Lehtosalo's work, asyncio was fixed and extended by many.

So now he needs a project at Microsoft, he changed his mind (or had it changed under pressure) and this is the project. We'll see, I agree though that the first version will be underwhelming, the following versions will have a max speedup of 50% but will be celebrated at conferences and here.