But maybe the view of modern society as a tower built on the back of a million million one time conveniences that have since become indispensible isn't that far from the truth either?
Even if language X loses in microbencharks against language Y, if the application written in X is still within the project delivery SLA for acceptance testing, who cares about the microbencharks.
As a real world example, consider a firmware boot loader I wrote for a previous client. They needed to apply code polymorphism (think, extreme ASLR) when they applied an over-the-air update or a factory reset of firmware. This is part of their defense in depth strategy: if a gadget attack were discovered in their system, they wanted to mitigate its effectiveness across all deployments. The problem with this approach is that boot loaders are tightly space constrained. To implement a sound code polymorphism strategy, around a dozen different heuristics must be applied in several passes over the code. These heuristics had to be weighed against timing and cache coherency constraints in the code under mutation, but most critically, these heuristics had to fit in the very limited space set aside for the boot loader. The GC was an optimization. It significantly reduced the code size of the heuristics.
The last 50 years of CVEs suggests they're not so trivial.
That's why static typing and unit testing are both practically much better at reducing bugs than they have any right to be theoretically.
Just like static typing is a convenience. And dynamic typing is a (different) convenience. And unit tests are a convenience.
The computer runs fine without any of these. And none of them are a magic wand that eliminates all bugs. Instead all of them make debugging easier by reducing the search space, usually eliminating fairly trivial bugs. Which is more useful than it sounds because a lot (the majority?) of bugs are pretty trivial and at the same time hard to find because they are often so trivial that they stare us in the face and we can't see them.
But again, all these things are conveniences for the human programmer, they don't make one iota of a difference for the actual computer running the bits.