I think you're over estimating the impact or relevance of that anecdote. Particularly since the "static compilation makes us faster" crowd turned out to be correct, and people use JITs for non-performance reasons and just pay the performance tax they so often come with. The time-constrained nature in which a JIT has to run just largely kills it's theoretical runtime information gathering advantages. Devirtualization remains about the most advanced trick in the JIT book, which is generally not an issue static compiled languages struggle with in the first place.