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>Because even a just-in-time compiler is slower than native performance quite frequently.

No that's not how it works. The problem with most JIT'd languages is that every variable or field is a pointer, every function call is a virtual call and there are no type signatures to help a compiler. These are the main reasons. If you added structs, nonvirtual functions and type hints you will quickly enter C performance territory (this is basically what asm.js does).

JIT compilers heavily use profiler guided optimizations to avoid the overheads associated with dynamic languages. They can often inline polymorphic function calls because usually 98% the variable points to an instance of type X and the remaining 2% to type Y. Falling back to a normal polymorphic call if the type is not Y. This is something an AOT compiler cannot do.

You are ignoring that the 12 core Xeons are still relatively cheap at $2000 which means it's still affordable to just buy four of them and put them into a single server.

The main reason is vendor lockin. As long as you stay within AWS you will pay barely anything but if you want to use both AWS and Google Cloud then it will start getting expensive.

In reality it increased competition. No business wants to touch GPL'd code so they simply write their own code. The only thing the GPL ensures is duplicated work and effort.

That may be a roadblock but the primary reason why smartphones are relatively unproductive is because a touch only interface has the disadvantage that you can only interact with things that are visible on the screen. When your screen is less than 7" big and 30% of that space is wasted by a virtual keyboard then the only way to design a UI for a smartphone is to have as few interactions as possible, otherwise we end up having to constantly scroll up and down. The end result is that a lot of apps are hiding core functionality behind the hamburger icon.