I think the main reason for worse performance is not adding unnecessary features or covering lazyness. It's due to additional complexity introduced by additional layers like VMs, sandboxes and frameworks. These things make development more fun, quicker, cheaper and easier to target more platforms. I think software wouldn't have evolved so fast if every dev was still doing manual memory management in C.

Don't get me wrong, close-to-metal coding and native, fast UIs are wonderful where appropriate, but there's no sense in doing it for every small cookie bakery website.