They are far from catching up on compilation, GC and low-overhead observability technology. Those developments didn't happen in 1994; they have been happening continuously over the past 25 year (e.g., in the past few years we've seen ZGC, JFR and Graal), where Java is still far ahead of the pack.
I don't know where you're getting the 1% -- in some of those benchmarks it's much higher (and remember that Scala and Kotlin are also Java -- they rely on the same compilers, GCs and monitoring; they just replace the frontend compiler, which is less than 10% of the JDK). Also, the benchmarks are very simple, and hardly exercise the platform's power. And they don't measure other capabilities at all. For example, Go may not be far behind on performance, but its observability is shit, it doesn't have good dynamic linkage, and other important features.
Again, I am not saying that other platforms may not have advantages elsewhere (e.g. lower memory footprint, no warmup), but when it comes to compilation, GC and observability, Java is about a whole technological generation ahead.
