There's PackageCompiler[0] which allows to precompile the packages you need for work into a system image. This means avoiding precompilation in the REPL every time you start up Julia. That's if you start with the custom system image.

However, it's a community effort and is somewhat non-trivial to get up and running with. Once Julia gets better precompilation/binary packaging support, common workflows like plotting will improve dramatically.

[0]: https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl