Correct. I think the parent commenter is confusing a language's concrete syntax with its abstract syntax. At the end of the day, the ease (or lack there of) of translating an AST into performant executing code is highly correlated with the potential variance of those ASTs.

The more higher-level expressions your languages supports, the more work its compiler (whether targeting physical or virtual hardware) must do to translate those ASTs into "machine" code and the higher the variance of that code during its execution workload.

It's even more work when that language's expressions are declarative instead of imperative.