True, but I expect that only ~2% of programs to ever run into this problem
I've ran into situations when displaying text on the screen was lagging - and that in several different programs, on various (modern) computers. Not saying GC was a problem there, but I guess this has something to do with the generally accepted culture of "only 2% of programs need high performance".
There is difference between GC overhead, VM overhead, interpreter overhead, and programmer not understanding basic concepts and doing stupid shit.
Go is GC language and tools written in Go often approach C/C++ speeds, despite lacking an optimizer like LLVM and lack of some performance oriented features. Another example is OCaml.
As you said, it's usually not a GC issue. Many of these ridiculously slow programs you talk about are written in C++.
Summarising - using a GCed language instead of dropping a few occasional clone calls in the code is bad advice, unless the program is really a one-off fire and forget thing (but these are not 98% of software).
However I agree the idea only a few software need to run fast is bullcrap.