Compile times have dropped precipitously, around 5 sec on master for plots.jl. less than one second if you use the package compiler.
This doesn't purport to be a review of Julia, it's one small part of a tutorial series so not sure why you are expecting a discussion of every trade-off.
Also, what part of Julia is being oversold here?
I cannot reconcile your claim with those quotations from the GitHub issue:
> It's frustrating, but I don't think it's a permanent situation. A lot of work has already been done on pre-compling Julia code, and when that's extended to packages, things should be much better.
> Making this stuff more convenient is definitely desirable and will happen.
> Agreed. But do keep in mind that the procedure I outlined allows you to avoid precisely this problem, with very little effort
> That would be nice. It will happen when someone makes it happen.
For "recent" development, there's a lot of work going into fixing latency issues and improving load times of packages generally: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3Al...
How many people know that loading the graph plotting library takes 30 seconds, and that is working as intended?
https://github.com/GiovineItalia/Gadfly.jl/issues/251
I've tried to use Julia a number of times and the experience is always worse than Matlab.