I was commenting on "why did they design Java that way in the first place", as opposed to (say) Go.

I agree that once the primary use of Java moved outside the browser, there was no particular reason to not give the option of AOT too. I'm not sure why Sun was so adamantly opposed to the idea.

If I recall correctly, Sun really wanted to stick with JIT on Java Embedded too, they just couldn't get it to run fast enough on embedded hardware. For desktop and servers, they considered bytecode interpretation and JIT "fast enough".