The reason why I think it makes sense to prioritize perf over everything except safety is that, if Rust is not the fastest high-level programming language, important systems will be implemented in a faster, unsafe language.
You can solve maintainability and compile-times by throwing more resources at the problem. But, if you hit perf ceiling of the language, you need to choose another language. Using a faster language just for hot spots doesn't really work, due to communication overhead (insightful post about this). What makes this especially insidious is that, if you might hit perf ceiling in the future, you need to choose the faster language now, as the alternative is a rewrite.