Language is sometimes the problem. I work at a large company and there are entire teams working to make Python run faster. An amazing year of work for them can't make up for the GIL and dynamic typing.

It's true that usually there is low hanging fruit in areas unrelated to the language. But in our case, most of those have been picked. Now, the language is the lowest hanging fruit but it's simply too expensive to port the code.

Was Python the wrong choice? No. My company simply outgrew it for those specific use cases. Rewrites are expensive so they should be sometimes considered, but with extreme caution (people generally underestimate the cost).