[yxlx]

I think the way to read that paragraph is as two separate statements.

>PHP is a slow abomination. The entirety of Drupal and all modules have to be bootstrapped and run on every request.

and

>It runs far too many SQL queries and those queries look atrocious (nested selects, tons of joins, etc).

So the first part is about slowness due to how PHP is usually run. The second part is about slowness due to the implementation of Drupal.

When I say "how PHP is usually run", I mean that strictly speaking one could probably write PHP in a way such that there is one part which comprises all the things that take most of the time to load and have this run standalone. However, I think going to such extents might be more work to do in PHP compared to picking another language. Then again, I haven't written PHP for several years and even when I did I never did any advanced stuff so for all I know what I'm saying here might be something PHP professionals have already thought of.