I think the line there is blurry. If someone said "bare metal Smalltalk" I'd probably assume they were referring to a Smalltalk VM running directly on the hardware.
Bare metal Java exists, because Java-oriented CPUs were and are a thing.
Have you realized that every smart card you have, like a bank card, or a SIM card in your phone, runs Java code inside, using such a Java-optimized CPU? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card