Exactly!

We rewrote some Fortran code (known for fast perf) into Python and the net result was faster. Why? They used bubble sort in a hot loop, whereas we used Python's built-in sort (probably qsort or similar). So despite Python being "slower" on average, good architecture matters a lot more.

And your Python code doesn't have to be 100% Python, you can write performance-critical code in something else, like C++ or Rust. This is very common, and it's why popular Python libraries like numpy and scipy are written in a more performant language with a Python wrapper.