Javascript is much closer to java than to python in terms of performance. And due to the variability of the JIT compilers, it can sometimes be faster than java, but generally the latter wins out.

But the parent poster is right that the two teams did choose a different workload to optimize for, V8 being fast faster while java taking more time to JIT compile a region, but that is mostly due to the difference between their most-common uses, running websites’ code as soon as they load vs mostly running on huge—ass servers with sometimes terabytes of RAM.