The JVM takes tens of milliseconds to boot up, not a second and a half.
Never saw an instantly starting JVM in my life though.
That adds up, fast. No idea how is it nowadays, admittedly. Maybe a ton of optimization work was done.
Yes, between Java 8 and modern java there were changes to the GC, startup time, JIT and probably more.
If you want, it java should now start pretty quickly.