Yes, I am aware. I didn't say that GCC wasn't necessary. Performance does matter. However, if he had a better Lisp then as Moore's Law advanced over the past 3 decades, Lisp could have become more common. Emacs Lisp is slow and it's also not a standard like Common Lisp or Scheme.
We'd all agree C isn't as necessary today. Lots of great stuff is done in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Clojure, etc. Developers are building editors in browsers (atom.io) and Microsoft used atom with 200k of Typescript in their new cross-platform tools.
There are loads of languages like that, I don't think that you can blame rms for this. For example, the MLs are currently kinda hot, ocaml especially, and have been around for donkey's years; but in the early 1990s they were very slow.
Lots of the applications written in ML are barely viable; the only reason they're performant now is due to Moore's law.
It doesn't matter what was before 3 decades. You have the environment that exists now. You can use better Lisp, if it's good enough now, for what you need to do. For the resource limited and performance critical stuff I still use C and a lot of actual environments still need C-level performance and the resource use patterns.
And all this is not because of what RMS did or didn't do. He did great things, and I don't agree that anybody can claim that he could have done something differently given the real constrains he had.
We'd all agree C isn't as necessary today. Lots of great stuff is done in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Clojure, etc. Developers are building editors in browsers (atom.io) and Microsoft used atom with 200k of Typescript in their new cross-platform tools.