Numba is like laminating wood to build structural beams - it will get you close to the performance of metal, for some applications, if you can accept the weight increase etc.
Numba could be seen as misguided from some points of view. E.g. when using Python for high performance scientific computing, you will typically be writing your computational kernels, I/O etc. in some compiled, superfast language (C/Fortran/CUDA/whatnot) and all the input handling/case setup/etc. in Python. If 1% of your compute time is spent Python and 99% is carefully optimized C, Numba is obviously pointless.
But that's for one application. Python is used for so many different things that you can't make blanket statements like this.
Numba could be seen as misguided from some points of view. E.g. when using Python for high performance scientific computing, you will typically be writing your computational kernels, I/O etc. in some compiled, superfast language (C/Fortran/CUDA/whatnot) and all the input handling/case setup/etc. in Python. If 1% of your compute time is spent Python and 99% is carefully optimized C, Numba is obviously pointless.
But that's for one application. Python is used for so many different things that you can't make blanket statements like this.