Loads of features have been added to JS that have worse performance or theoretically enable worse performance, but that never stopped them before.
Some concrete (not-exhaustive) examples:
* Private variables are generally 30-50% slower than non-private variables (and also break proxies).
* let/const are a few percent slower than var.
* Generators are slower than loops.
* Iterators are often slower due to generating garbage for return values.
* Rest/spread operators hide that you're allocating new arrays and objects.
* Proxies cause insane slowdowns of your code.
* Allowing sub-classing of builtins makes everything slow.
* BigInt as designs is almost always slower than the engine's inferred 31-bit integers.
Meanwhile, Google and Mozilla refuse to implement proper tail calls even though they would INCREASE performance for a lot of code. They killed their SIMD projects (despite having them already implemented) which also reduced performance for the most performance-sensitive applications.
It seems obvious that performance is a non-issue when it's something they want to add and an easy excuse when it's something they don't want to add.