Indeed. Most of the hate is due to slow start-up time, but once it gets warmed up, the modern JVM has state of the art dynamic compilation and GC. Thousands of man years have been spent getting it to that point.
With Project Leyden being implemented and JEP 516 coming very soon, those worries will be a thing of the past. Now you can get incredible AOT performance without having to depend on Babashka or GraalVM workarounds.