Is it? I've looked hard and couldn't find any runtime that isn't more than five years behind OpenJDK(+Graal) in those areas, but maybe I missed something. I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's nothing out there that's better in those areas.

Just to add to your point the only alternative that I would consider is .NET, and even then I do acknowledge that it is behind some JIT stuff, given that they have been favoring AOT / and single JIT scenarios.

Without Valhahla we will never get a Java variant of Unity, jMonkey Engine is a good as it gets and it has plenty of native code to overcome the areas where the JVM is found lacking.

You don't need Graal when you have Golang around the corner.

Golang's garbage collection system isn't just NOT state-of-the-art; it brings you back to the 1970s. A big pain point there.

We're not talking about the same thing. The innovative parts of Graal are not the AOT compiler.