Your argument seems ideological. There is no chance they could have improved Flake8 to be as good as Ruff is.
But that doesn't stop me from feeling that there were things lost in this process and wishing for a better outcome.
When this happens periodically (rather than, every other week) you also get the original GNU advantage which is you can revisit an old tool but knowing what you know now, for example today "everybody" has DVCS, and so ripgrep checks for the .gitignore file.
I don't think you could get flake8 to be as fast as Ruff, but I think you could improve it to be within an order of magnitude, and honestly that's plenty good enough. There are a lot of low hanging fruit, particularly around caching. I'd push back on there being no chance of being "as good as" Ruff, because "good" is not just speed. Ruff is _not complete_, if you want all the features and linters, you still need Flake8, or you have to sacrifice some. It's also not publicly extensible, and not written in Python, both of which are fair choices but I think deviate from the ideal scenario here.