Yep, agreed on all accounts. People simply love their languages and will point out any area they "win" at, even if it's inconsequential and not at all important. And that's happening a lot, including TechEmpower benchmarks, speed-to-first-MVP, and many others.
Can a python or ruby dev bang out Advent of Code faster than I can in zig or rust? Sure. Is advent of code representative of a multi-year long business system where coding is 15% of the time cost at the high end? Nah.
When you look at the actual bills and where the actual time goes, spending time on optimizing the code pace of a MVP is simply not valuable. You’re saving a small percent of a small percent of time at the beginning to accept using languages that are not know for their steady state support ability.