Yes, exactly. It's tragic that the only way programming culture ever improves is when a language comes out that's better for writing software in and happens to also have bigger numbers on microbenchmarks.

I think you're generalizing a bit too much. Rust targetted the audience that wanted big numbers on microbenchmarks, but not all languages do. Typescript for example has no performance advantage against Javascript, but it became very popular due to the better dev experience. Kotlin is another example where that mattered a lot.