It's not like performance is a fundamental property of the language, it's just a matter of which tools are available. JITs outperforming compilers is just a matter of specialized compilation approach being able to outperform a generalized compilation approach, which is actually a far more fundamental truth than abstractions having a performance penalty. LLVM outperforms GCC in some cases.

However, in general JITs do not outperform GCC. The JIT overhead only pays off in a limited set of cases.

Most people publishing performance benchmarks on the Internet barely know how to compile a C program for production, let alone write or benchmark one. Google did a thorough benchmark of several languages and C++ was the clear winner: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...