the performance will take a hit

This is not entirely true. Is there overhead? Sure. But, if the distro used for the container provides (somehow) faster or more performative packages to begin with, then running software within a fast container can be faster that running it natively on the slower host. Link to the comment in which the link to the above benchmark can be found as proof. As can be seen, the Clear Linux container performs better in 90% of the benchmarks. And, the Fedora container is only negligibly (so within margin of error) less performative than the Fedora host.