I broadly agree with the thrust here. I find it funny because as a hardware engineer I know hardware languages literally don't work for hardware. You can write almost any crazy valid HDL (insert any systemverilog testbench code here), but there's no chance it'll map to something reasonable in your target device. Maybe you're targeting FPGA, maybe ASIC, whatever. The language let's you express anything, but what you need to express is legal. As such, what you need to bring to the table is a clear understanding of what you expect your code to map to in whatever device you're targeting.

The same is true in low level software, if you're really interestied in performance it doesn't matter if you express yourself in Rust or C++ what you're really doing is trying hard to point the compiler to one best solution- a solution you know through either experience or experiment. If you care less about performance, pick a higher level language and trust the compiler more. If you're just trying to solve a problem and don't need performance at all (any python script, or building the worlds most popular code editor) just stick to python or javascript or something.