The very fact that Project Valhalla had to create new opt-in syntax for value classes, in order to get what Go does by default on all its types, is the admission of defeat of a herculean battle of attempting to optimize desite fundamental problems with Java's design.
Value classes won't make criticism outdated, because they don't fix any fundamental problems, they just provide an opt-in feature with significant restrictions.
If your argument is that optional syntax is bad, sure, we can do that, but it has nothing to do with GC performance.
Go's GC is nowhere near as complex, and yet it performs much better, because Go decided not to shoot itself in the foot.
Except this criticism will be outdated. (but then you moved the goal post to syntax).
> Go's GC is nowhere near as complex, and yet it performs much better
Benchmarks prove otherwise.
> Benchmarks prove otherwise
Well, good luck running the benchmarks on your production servers.