It isn't. Perhaps you haven't seen what the JVM can do lately. It's got JIT compilers that do this[1], GCs that are getting close to 1ms max pause times on terabytes of heap [2], and low-overhead, in-production deep profiling [3]. Not to mention all of the classic capabilities of the JVM like hot code redefinition and exceptional monitoring. Lots of applications can certainly manage well without some or even all those things, and some want other tradeoffs (like no warmup or lower RAM footprint), but these days it's hard to compete with the JVM where it's strong. The technological gap between it and other runtimes is only growing.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/619885182104043520

[2]: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~pliden/slides/ZGC-Jfokus-2019.pd...

[3]: https://craftingjava.com/using-java-flight-recorder-with-ope...