I would say that it’s extremely unlikely.
Websites in general are never limited by raw code execution, they are mostly limited by IO. Be that disk IO as files are read and written, database IO as you need to execute complex queries to gather all the data to build the user timeline, and network IO to transfer data to and from the user. For decentralized social media like Kbin or Lemmy its even more IO limited as each instance needs to go back and forth to other instances to keep up-to-date data.
Websites usually benefit much more from caching and in-memory databases to keep frequently used data in fast storage.
This is why simple, high level, object oriented, garbage collected languages have become so common. All the CPU performance penalties they incur don’t actually affect the website performance.
If they wanted to get rid of gifting premium why wouldn’t they just do that? “Awards no longer give premium for free” and that’s it, or maybe just massively reduce the amount of premium, maybe it doesn’t accumulate if you get more than one award, etc.