Yeah it's definitely welcome, but even if it is double the performance (doesn't seem to be quite there in my experience) fast languages are still 25-50x faster. It's like walking twice as fast when the alternative is driving.
Well, it really depends on whether that alternative is open to you, and at what cost.
So eg lots of machine learning code is held together by duct tape and Python. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Python modules implemented in (faster) non-Python languages.
The parts that remain in Python could potentially be sped up by migrating them, too. But that migration would likely not do too much for the overall performance, but still be pretty expensive to do (in terms of engineering effort).
For organisations in these kinds of situations, it makes a lot of sense to hope for / contribute to a faster Python. Especially if it's a drop-in replacement (like Python 3.12 is for 3.9).
What makes really me hopefully is actually JavaScript: on the face of it, JavaScript is actually about the worst language to have a fast implementation. But thanks to advances in clever compiler and interpreter techniques, JavaScript is one of the decently fast languages these days. Especially if you are willing to work in a restricted subset of the language for substantial parts of your code.
I'm hoping Python can benefit from similar efforts. Especially since they don't need to re-invent the wheel, but can learn from the earlier and ongoing JavaScript efforts.
(I myself made some tiny efforts for CPython performance and correctness. Some of them were even accepted into their repository.)
