I've used native-image both directly and indirectly. Directly to implement a Clojure-language authentication server which needed a small memory footprint. Indirectly through @borkdude's https://github.com/babashka/babashka which provides a native-image binary that can run much of the Clojure language.

We open-sourced some babashka code at https://github.com/staticweb-io/staticweb-open-wp/tree/maste... One major caveat: when I wrote that code, babashka didn't have any MySQL support, so I shelled out to the MySQL CLI. Later, I figured out how to compile the MySQL JDBC drivers with native-image and it's now available at https://github.com/babashka/babashka-sql-pods along with HSQLDB, SQL Server, Oracle, and Postgres drivers.

Twitter was already using it in 2019.

https://jeeconf.com/program/performance-tuning-twitter-servi...