Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

I'm not sure if JavaScript supports it, but some Python libraries allow you to choose whether to install a more optimized binary version or the pure Python implementation.

For example, if you install psycopg you'll get a pure Python implementation which is easy to debug and hack. But you can also install psycopg[binary] to obtain a faster, compiled version of the library. https://www.psycopg.org/psycopg3/docs/basic/install.html

That typically means two totally different implementations, and pure Python versions are often unusably slow, so it doesn't help much to hack that.