> you can just as easily force the compiler
Have you actually tried the instructions in there? I did, to get a better time for julia in the n-body programming languages shootout https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... (I am the current leader among julia implementations). Suffice it to say, it did not work. I mean i'm not a brilliant programmer or anything, but I would hardly say it's "just as easily".
I am a Julia noob and managed to use PackageCompiler.jl for a package I wrote and it just worked out of the box.
I think the only non-stdlib package I used was StaticArrays, but I was able to use the happy path described in the PackageCompiler docs and got it working in an hour or so max. This was probably in March or April, so relatively recent.
This is not true for Julia, you can simply precompile the code: https://medium.com/@sdanisch/compiling-julia-binaries-ddd6d4...
Julia's default model is that script functions are only JIT compiled when run (just like the JVM, etc.), but you can just as easily force the compile and stick it in an image.