Has anyone tried runnig those benchmarks with AOT Java? Microbenchmarks like these tell absolutely nothing about general performance because they are short-lived. JVM is a beautiful piece of engineering and I believe you guys chose well this platform to host it, always hoped for a ML-inspired language running on the JVM and this looks like it.
It seems that the situation is not as clear cut as your post suggests.
(I am one of the authors of Flix)