Philosophy aside, that is a fine reason to reject the patch unless you can convince the reviewer (and the committee) that you are in the right (you very well may be).
Also, just want to also say Python reviewers are great. They're very good at explaining issues with patches & are willing to collaborate on improving a patch when necessary. There's a long list of backlog issues because there is simply not enough review to go around, not because of a lack of quality. Highly recommend CPython to people who want to get involved in contributing to an open source project, even just testing patches helps
And I think that's ok. Python wants to be simple and straightforward and performance was never a goal.
If you need performance don't use Python, or write a python library in C/C++/Rust and do the heavy lifting there.