I reckon part of the point is that a VM (in the JVM or CLR sense) might be a poor fit for the given use case, as might an automatic garbage collector, and thus that might dictate the use of languages which rely on neither (like C/C++ or Rust).

If you do a trivial amount of up-front work, C and Luajit have these properties, but Luajit often isn't a suitable replacement for the JVM and C isn't a VM. So no.