The civil war was not fought over slavery. The union chose to free the slaves because it hurt the south economically more than it hurt the north economically.
And if the GC ever starts slowing you down, just run a profiler and eliminate the allocations. It's usually as simple as replacing a dependency or using sync.Pool in the hot path.
I looked into using Graal one time. Many of the dependencies I used were not compatible. I also encounter weird bugs with any of the OpenJ* alternatives. In Go, everything just works.
No, I got all that from my multiple years of repeated interactions with "hello" people and noticing a consistent pattern.
Maybe you don't fit that mold and just like to say hello and you are a good coworker without all the bad traits I mentioned. Didn't mean to make this personal... just sharing my observations of the past.