Godot has always had native module support; the reason it is not more popular is because it is more or less impossible to support a stable C++ ABI across compilers and operating systems. So you have to build Godot yourself for your dev platform and every platform you ship to. That is what GDExtension and the official C++ bindings solve. Once you set up your builds native modules are totally decent, but personally I find it saps productivity compared to GDScsript, and if you only need it for performance critical code then GDExtension is probably fine (I haven’t used it or GDNative, but I did write native modules before those other options existed).