But the reality was that JIT allows code to get faster over time, as the JIT improves.
Things like Jazelle let chip manufacturers paper over a paper objection.
Ehh .. PGO is only somewhat better for JIT than AOT. More often for purely-numerical code the win is because the AOT doesn't do per-machine `-march=native`. It's the memory model that kills JVM performance for any nontrivial app though.
Contrast this with the problem of specialization in AOT languages, which can easily result in bloated binaries (PGO does help here quite a lot, that much is true). For example, generics might output a completely new function for every type it gets instantiated with - if the function is not that hot, it actually makes sense to rather try to handle more cases with the same code.
There were those "LISP machines" in the early 1980s but when Common Lisp was designed they made sure it could be implemented efficiently on emerging 32-bit machines.