This isn't "compile your application to an EXE", like Go or Rust. This is "compile some or all of your application to a DLL, and then have the Java runtime use that DLL".
In other words, you still need a JRE available. The use case for this is simply optimizing hotspots in some very specialized situations.
This is significant for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it.
The entry-level edition of Excelsior JET is free (as in beer) since the end of August 2016. Licenses for the more senior editions have been available for non-commercial use at no cost for many years.
AOT compilation is mostly intended to address startup time, Java has a big std library and much of it needs to be interpreted and compiled each time it runs. Between jigsaw modules and this, we should see some nice improvements in startup time.
For me the JVM starts really quickly; the only performance issues I've seen there are related to large bloated frameworks doing too much at load time. I don't recall the std library being a factor at all (and why do you think it is recompiled every invocation?)