Luajit and SBCL are very much performance competitive with the JVM? Why do you say that they're not?

Random example benchmark: https://madnight.github.io/benchmarksgame/lisp.html

They absolutely are. Maybe not if the only thing you’re benchmarking is something completely CPU bound like signal processing/math, but they’re definitely competitive for tons of real use cases.

They don’t really need to be though. They take far fewer tokens and are still faster to develop with