That is true, yes, but still comparing e.g. Rust vs. Ruby I'd think Rust spends anywhere from 10ns to 100ns (outside of waiting on DB) and Ruby no less than 10 ms. Still pretty significant and can add up during times of big load.

Also I remember Rails' ActiveRecord having some pretty egregious performance footprint (we're talking 10ms to 100ms on top of DB waiting) but I hear that was fixed a while ago.