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Nonsense. There's nothing inherent in languages with automatic memory management that makes then unsuitable for performance sensitive applications. If the Android framework can be written in Java and be fast, the start menu can be implemented in JavaScript and be fast. They screwed it up for other reasons, sure, but there's no foundational reason you can't get good performance out of high level languages and many do.
This is a nitpick, and you're definitely right for the start menu; the real problem is probably something to do with network latency and poor caching and software design.
((Though there are some things separate from typical performance that can be Bad: Electron is just 'heavy' as an environment, so even were it perfectly performant, you just have to deal with it loading from disk and RAM, and that can be expensive. C# has similar problems at a smaller scale but made worse by repeating them per thread, hence the kinda goofy task not-threadpool thing. And the Start Menu in 11 is React Native, which is unlikely to have these particular problems but probably has its own instead.))
I'll caveat that memory-managed environments can have some foundational performance problems in some specific use cases: (esp nested) array access is extremely expensive in managed environments, and I've gotten three or four-fold improvements by merely changing to pointer access, and I'm sure someone who cares (and is smart enough to care) about cache locality could have gotten close to an order of magnitude out of it.
You can work around this by either having that language allow programmers to pin memory and use pointer-like features, have ways to pass data to unmanaged-memory languages, or have prebuilt tools that do these under the hood, and a lot of higher-level languages do (eg, python is three C++ wrappers in a trenchcoat at times). But if you have to actually touch a bunch of individual bytes, the difference can be a big deal.
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