It's also the question of what the burned CPU cycles actually buy. Cycles burned on testing buy us less buggy programs. Cycles burned on your CPU that do stuff like out-of-bounds checks or garbage collection also do that.

But most of them are burned on layers upon layers of abstraction that do not actually do anything useful safety- or correctness-wise; they're there solely because we've turned code reuse into a religion. Which wouldn't be bad by itself, if that religion had a firm commandment to not reuse bad solutions - yet that is exactly what we keep doing, again and again, patching it all with the software engineering equivalents of duck tape and glue to keep it all from falling apart. Why is C still at the bottom of virtually every software stack we run? Why do we keep writing desktop apps in HTML/JS? Does a simple app really need 20 dependencies of uncertain quality?

JavaScript is a good example. It's not a bad language because it's high-level - to the contrary, that's the best part of it! It's a bad language because, despite being high-level, it still gives any user ample opportunities to mess things up by accident. We need something just as (if not more) high level but better for general-purpose software development.