I'm a former game dev, I worked in PHP on the server side of our game and honestly - C++ is mostly just the dominant language because everyone is constantly overworked and everything has always been done in C++. Java and C# are some counter examples you offered which, if done right, should rival the performance you can get in C++ pretty trivially - Java may have a larger memory footprint for some things (it's harder to sanely get down to the bare metal within some contexts) but it's still quite fast. I honestly think that sometime soon we'll probably see Rust shoulder C++ out for game development once someone (eyes Epic) writes an engine with native language hooks in it simply because you get pretty much all of the performance characteristics along with one of the most valuable things in the world - extensive and resilient static code evaluation.
You can make things efficient in a plethora of different languages depending on the setting (PHP, similar to how I used it, is often chosen because it's extremely readable, flexible and all the expensive performance stuff you're doing is usually in SQL on the server-side anyways) but there are definitely certain languages that are better suited to some tasks. I would really suggest not focusing in on language choice that much though, since there are much more important decisions to make when discussing high performance architecture and having access to pointer arithmetic is, at this point, honestly more of a curse (since you have to deal with horribly unmaintainable crap in some library you need) than a benefit. Over a decade ago I had my first C++ job which used the Qt framework and using references by default (which Qt strong encourages but doesn't force) is simply a much more sane approach to development.
You can make things efficient in a plethora of different languages depending on the setting (PHP, similar to how I used it, is often chosen because it's extremely readable, flexible and all the expensive performance stuff you're doing is usually in SQL on the server-side anyways) but there are definitely certain languages that are better suited to some tasks. I would really suggest not focusing in on language choice that much though, since there are much more important decisions to make when discussing high performance architecture and having access to pointer arithmetic is, at this point, honestly more of a curse (since you have to deal with horribly unmaintainable crap in some library you need) than a benefit. Over a decade ago I had my first C++ job which used the Qt framework and using references by default (which Qt strong encourages but doesn't force) is simply a much more sane approach to development.