It seems you're mistakenly confusing the time a request takes to be fulfilled with performance.

In the server, performance means throughput. If means nothing if a task handler stays ages waiting for IO. What matters is that once a task is ready to run, the code that needs to run is as lean as you'd like.

This means you can handle more requests with less hardware.

I have no idea how we reached a time when people think it's a good idea to download over 100MB worth of dependencies just to have a service that can handle a HTTP request, and multicore computers packed to the rim with RAM just to be able to handle a few tens of HTTP requests per second.