What is ruining the performance and why is it default?
One example as one of the commenters noted was prefork being the default mpm. Something else valuable for static performance is allowoverride none (disable htaccess checking).
As to why it is default, I suspect due to the popularity of php and other modules which often misbehave on the threaded worker mpm.
I literally have systems with tweaked setting doing 45k/second hits at less then 10ms latency on Apache. You can't do that with default settings because again the brain dead default settings.
I think in general tuning each of these carefully could eek out more performance on any platform especially one with such a small footprint.