Earlier quoted context omitted.
My use of python is somewhat recent. But the two languages that I have used a lot of - Java and JS - have interpreters that were heavily optimized over time. I wonder why that never happened with python and, instead, everyone continues to write their critical code in C/Rust. I am planning to shift some of my stuff to pypy (so a "fast" python exists, kind of). But some dependencies can be problematic, I have heard.
Neither Java nor JS encourages the use of native extensions to the same degree that Python does. So some of it is a fundamental difference in approach: Python has gotten very far by offloading hot paths into native code instead of optimizing the interpreter itself. (Recent positive developments in Python’s interpreted performance have subverted this informal tendency.)
You already had billions of lines of Java and JS code that HAD to be sped up. So they had no alternative. If python had gone down the same route, speeding it up without caveats would have been that much easier.