Yup, the JVM is something that people (esp. startups & new-co's) are, all things being equal, vastly underusing or over-complaining about :).
Before I started doing Clojure the JVM ecosystem was this "scary" thing but 4 years later I've learned to appreciate it a lot - stable AND sound libraries, high performance out-of-the box, and very,very high performance if you really need it.
There's absolutely nothing about native languages that makes them a-priori faster than the JVM. On the contrary, the JVMs compiler is likely to emit betteroptimized machine code than their compilers. Some low-level languages (like C/C++/Rust) can (and do in many cases) offer better performance, but that's not because they're "native" but because they allow (and require) finer control over every operation. This level of control comes at a significant cost, though.
What clojure and even scala do with the JVM scares me. The most concrete example I know of is using objects for everything. 1 of the fundamental problems I have with many of the higher level JVM languages is how much they hide from you. That being said, most people won't notice. I do numerical software in java so might be a bit more sensitive to some of this stuff.
Before I started doing Clojure the JVM ecosystem was this "scary" thing but 4 years later I've learned to appreciate it a lot - stable AND sound libraries, high performance out-of-the box, and very,very high performance if you really need it.