Although sometimes the performance when interpreted before warm-up is important.

Testing with CompilerControl.Mode.EXCLUDE in JMH is still more reliable than testing manually, when you don't know if it got compiled or not.

Interpreted code is a case where method handles should be much faster than the generated accessor classes used by reflection - lambdas and method references are faster than an inner class implementing a functional interface before jit compilation. Afterwards, performance tends to be sameish.