Pyston as far as I was tracking, it seems to be mainly 2 devs from Dropbox, hardly that better off.

You have a point though, no company can replace javascript , the cost is straightly forbidden. But Python as mainly a backend language at the time, it can be more realistically replaced, with newer more performant alternatives like Golang, and to some extent node.js.

But it has its own stronghold, which is data/ml land stuff. However, that community has gotten around with Python in its own way, either they are tolering the slowness because that happens behind the scene, or they are bypassing the performance bottleneck to c-extensions.

So in the end, I guess people love complaining about Python's performance, including myself, but it never reaches the break point where they said enough is enough.

The number of devs is not so important. One author who is left alone from corporate BS for three years can achieve more than a collection of 10 randomly hired programmers who just disturb the lead dev.

As someone who has worked on language runtimes in a corporate environment, I believe there’s some truth to this. One successful example of this would be Mike Pall, of the LuaJIT fame.