Your conclusion is really a false dichotomy.
The square of something very very small (close to zero) is negligeable : thus subortibal hop (Concorde was flying at 18km altitute for example).
I don't know much of PHP, but reaching "Rust/Go" performance is not simply because they have AOT compiler, but because the semantic of the language itself allows efficient compilation.
Many attempts has been made for an AOT compiler for Python and Ruby, but they don't reach those performance because of this.
I'm (and millions other people) are using macOS with a classic scroll wheel mouse perfectly fine. Are you sure there is not something messing with the trackpad at the same time ? (this looking erratically random?)