I used to write extensively with C++, but it has been a long time since speed mattered that much to one of my applications. I still marvel at the cache-level optimizations some people come up with, but I’m in the same mindset as you now.

My workload split of Data Movement vs Data Transformation is like 95:5 these days, which means almost all the optimizations I do are changing batch/cache/page/filter settings. I can do that in any language with http bindings, so I choose those that are faster to write.