...which also seems to be reflective of how much programmers using language X care about (execution) efficiency, so I'd say these results are not far off from reality.

C and C++ are another interesting pair --- proponents of the latter always love to claim "zero cost abstractions" that allow you to write very abstract code which they say the compiler can then optimise (or clean up the mess, depending on your viewpoint...) to the same output as if you did it manually in C, but the results show a very different picture.