Is it? Benchmarks routinely show the async native database drivers outperforming JDBC ones in Java, and evented (async) IO is king in the only other contenders, C++ and Rust runtimes for RESTful and other server apps.
...and in how many circumstances are the database drivers the limiting factor in application performance?
As I said in the beginning, you will absolutely win in the extreme cases (and accordingly, those tend to be the drivers that are tuned more for performance). In most cases in won't really make much of a difference one way or the other, and in some cases it will actually inhibit performance.