>It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other kids on the block...
I would seriously contest the speed of Java compared to modern PHP. The JIT puts PHP at near-C performance levels with competently written code. Which shouldn't be surprising if you realize PHP is largely a "wrapper" around C.
I think you've proved your second point by getting your first wrong. The benchmarks posted are for a stack including PHP, not PHP itself (and not the fastest stack with e.g. pgsql).
Also, I don't think thosd benchmarks use php 8, which is the first version with the jit that the post above referred to.
I would seriously contest the speed of Java compared to modern PHP. The JIT puts PHP at near-C performance levels with competently written code. Which shouldn't be surprising if you realize PHP is largely a "wrapper" around C.