Sucrase does this by removing some things you might expect to be table stakes, like detecting invalid parse trees and complete JS syntax. Pragmatically, esbuild can also start faster and parallelize, which means shorter wall-clock builds.
Sure, but esbuild also drops features found in the compared tools to gain a performance edge. The language may bring some marginal difference, but it's clear that the algorithm is the most significant piece.
I'll leave you to your own benchmarks.