I've been away from Drupal for ~10 years, but I recently helped a friend spruce up a Drupal site he's working on and still found it's largely powered in production by heavy caching, and the page load speeds in development are a slog. I didn't know enough about how he built the site to know if that's still the case everywhere in Drupal or just his configuration, but my impression is still that it's absolutely not production ready without heavy caching in front of the site.
I've been away from Drupal for ~10 years, but I recently helped a friend spruce up a Drupal site he's working on and still found it's largely powered in production by heavy caching, and the page load speeds in development are a slog. I didn't know enough about how he built the site to know if that's still the case everywhere in Drupal or just his configuration, but my impression is still that it's absolutely not production ready without heavy caching in front of the site.