I'd heard that before! I kind of debated whether to put Java or QT first—it came down to the fact that QT apps just feel closer to me on macOS. Although I don’t know how ugly they are under the hood.
The Java SWT toolkit uses Cocoa native widgets under the hood. So it is a native UI toolkit. That said, like parent said, native doesn't necessarily translate to a user experience of being performant.
The rest of the application, being in Java, will often means it will have your typical JVM high memory usage and slow startup times.
Edit: What does LAF stand for?