There are numerous active, moderately serious efforts to both optimize and/or JIT Python bytecode. I think AOT compilation is mostly out-of-scope for 100% compatibility, but again, there's lots of different efforts to compile either subset languages or subsets of programs.

"Kicking and screaming" suggests some reluctance to embrace this, but I think that's probably unfair: it's just hard.

And that CPython's I/O isn't really the problem: some of its async event loop implementations are fairly competitive with Node.

But still ... yes.

Javascript has benefited from two decades of intensive, well-funded work by the best people in the business, with clear focus on performance as a high priority goal. Not to take away from those who work on Python, but I think it's fair to say the effort has had orders of magnitude difference.

I don't have a deep enough understanding to say whether the nature of Python or Javascript makes one better suited for performance optimization than the other. Python is perhaps able to benefit from seeing what's been done with Javascript, although of course Javascript has stood on the shoulders of its own giants.

That's not to say that Python will ever get there. My understanding is that the design of the language and leaky implementation details make generally compiling Python to fast machine code nearly impossible.