There is. Ruby's speed is roughly comparable with Python today, and the Ruby 3 push is largely around performance. However, you've got to remember that Rails took off on a generation of Ruby VM architecture much slower than currently available. There's a very large set of problems which Rails works for where the interpreter just isn't the bottleneck.
On the other side of the equation, the reason Ruby has taken such a (comparatively) long time to make fast is that the language does a bunch of stuff that is just really hard to optimise. Not only that, but those facilities (like... defining methods on core classes at arbitrary points of execution, for instance) turn out to have been quite heavily used, so it's not reasonable to remove those facilities in the name of speed.
On the other side of the equation, the reason Ruby has taken such a (comparatively) long time to make fast is that the language does a bunch of stuff that is just really hard to optimise. Not only that, but those facilities (like... defining methods on core classes at arbitrary points of execution, for instance) turn out to have been quite heavily used, so it's not reasonable to remove those facilities in the name of speed.