[Gethsemane]

It does seem like a bit of an unfair comparison. That being said, I am not aware of any k-mer python packages that have great performance. If k-mer counting performance was really important, I'd probably start to think about reaching for one of the more performant counters, such as KMC.

The real benefit of python in bioinformatics is the number of libraries available that let you interact with a bunch of software, perhaps do some light analysis, maybe make some pretty plots. And if you want to do some more intensive "useful" analysis, then all the ML packages, numpy, polars etc are quite hard to dismiss.