> Rust is faster than ...

Not if you use the wrong constructs, copy stuff around in the heap, use ref counting everywhere in longer running processes.

I'm not nitpicking here, in Rust you can get really fast, but its on you to make that happen.

For example persistent data-structures (used in Clojure) are really fast and for some operations and cases even close to optimal.

Performance is hard, and I very much agree with your question here. What has been measured and what are the results.