What is not obvious in this well-known "benchmark game" is that coders are allowed to use low-level tricks to make the code as fast as possible.
It was meant to display the fastest possible way of each language/framework.
Some experts of each language are indeed involved into tuning the code.
As a result, some of the code is highly optimized, but also really complicated/unreadable.
To be realistic and fair, no one write such code for a regular project, unless it is part of a library or a very sensitive core business (like finance or a game).
IMHO this "benchmark game" does not compare languages for their day-to-day usage.
I would never draw any conclusion from this "benchmark game" to pickup one language over another.
C almost always win. If you need something really fast, rewrite the sensitive part in C, then call it from your own language.
To compare solutions, I prefer something more simple, and more realistic, which tries to use the built-in language features.
The simple challenge we discussed about at
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,61035.0.html is more likely to be useful for discussion.
It compares languages and libraries about a simple but realistic use case: returning some JSON from CSV data read into memory, in a REST/HTTP server.
It has no C/C++ version yet, because it targeted high-level "modern" languages.
My guess is that with some modern C/C++ libraries, you may reach very high performance.
We added two pascal versions to the challenge.
Some thought about it at
https://blog.synopse.info/?post/2022/11/26/Modern-Pascal-is-Still-in-the-RaceIn short: if someone says pascal is old/deprecated/slow, then it is clearly not.
You can write expressive and efficient code with pascal, with no highly complicated/unreadable code.
For this use case, the pascal server produces more than 900MB/s of results, so much more than any network interface is able to serve today.

Feel free to redirect my blog link to the "somebody" who sent you the benchmark games link.