Reminds me people blaming clojure slow boot on the JVM when it was in fact clojure tooling that took time.
Things aren't straightforward, we need to go deep before concluding. Profilers, profilers, profilers.
There are people in college or entering the workforce who weren't even alive during the "Java is slow" period. The HotSpot JIT has been around since 1999. I wonder if we'll ever be able to let this go.
That said, it's still pretty heavyweight (both the language and the runtime).
It also wouldn't be my first choice for compute intensive tasks (for example, a non-toy ray tracer). It would do the job eventually, but at a cost. Of course, I wouldn't pick Go or Python either.