The Python C api leaks its guts. Too much of the internal representation was made available for extensions and now basically any change would be guaranteed to break backwards compatibility with something.

For what it’s worth Ruby’s JIT took several different implementations, definitely struggled with Rails compatibility and literally used some people’s PhD research. It wasn’t a trivial affair

I can't really talk about Ruby. But PHP is much more static and surface of things you have to care about at runtime is like magnitude smaller and there already was opache as a starting point. And speaking of something like JIT in V8 is of the most sophisticated and complicated ever built. There hasn't been near enough man hours and funding to cpython to make it fair comparison

Some languages are much harder to compile well to machine code. Some big factors (for any languages) are things like: lack of static types and high "type uncertainty", other dynamic language features, established inefficient extension interfaces that have to be maintained, unusual threading models...

For better or for worse they have been very consistent throughout the years that they don't want want to degrade existing performance. It is why the GIL existed for so long

I thought php hasn't shipped jit yet (as in its behind a disabled by default config)

Are you forgetting about PyPy, which has existed for almost 2 decades at this point?

PHP and JS had huge tech companies pouring resources into making them fast.

Money.