I do wish that Julia would start up in an interpreted mode and compile in the background so that it would be fast enough when first opened and then attain maximum speed later on. (I think this is how JavaScript engines work?)
The problem with Julia tooling in general is that they feel 90% done. And tooling is, in my opinion, more important than the language itself.
There's much more recent work here: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and apparently some more is still ongoing privately.
That said, yeah. I would not recommend Julia currently for people who truly believe they need AOT compilation, and that they need to trigger AOT compilation very often and with low friction. That definitely needs more work, but it's happening.
That said, a lot of people overestimate how much they actually need AOT compilation.
Julia has some fantastic tooling in other areas though. Especially the package management and interactive analysis tools.
Yes, modern V8 does this, as does the JVM. Common Lisp runtimes also often support this, though I think they usually leave it up to the programmer to choose when to compile a function, they don't always do it automatically. The .NET CLR also behaves like Julia - JIT compile on first execution of every function.