I wonder why they don't just have an optional pre-compilation, so once you have a version you're happy with and want to run in production, you just have a fully compiled version of the code that you run.
Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install.
Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to plot" is now only a couple of seconds thanks to this (and subsequent plots are, of course, much faster than that).