Ruby's basically as fast as Node.js. If you look at comparative benchmarks, Roda/Rack/Puma is within spitting distance of Koa, Fastify, etc. Express is actually slower in some benchmarks.
I don't think a lot of people are aware of just how much faster the Ruby ecosystem has gotten in the past few years (especially when you leave Rails out of the equation which is known not to do well in microbenchmarks).
I just heard Matz saying yesterday additional effort will be made to make Ruby run faster specifically on benchmarks. He said while they don't always correlate completely to real world performance, since developers seem to care a lot about benchmarks he wants Ruby devs to feel good about themselves and score well on these.
I don't think a lot of people are aware of just how much faster the Ruby ecosystem has gotten in the past few years (especially when you leave Rails out of the equation which is known not to do well in microbenchmarks).