Things don't always get worse. Sometimes they get better.

TypeScript recently invited people to try their new compiler which is 7-10x faster. [1]

VS Code is popular, but personally I write TypeScript in Vim, which is definitely faster and less resource-intensive than Eclipse. But thanks to VS Code's invention of the Language Server Protocol and its subsequent adoption in many editors, I can get 'compile the code as you type' functionality. [2]

And then there's runtime speed. Java used to have legendarily slow startup times, and they're still an issue today. JavaScript's modern runtimes are optimized to start fast. On the other hand, Java still holds the crown for throughput, so it's a mixed bag. But if you want even better throughput without sacrificing too much usability, today we have Rust, as well as a vastly improved C++. (Though both of those languages have terrible compile times.)

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typesc...

[2] To be fair, a memory usage comparison should compare Eclipse not to Vim itself, but to the whole [Vim + coc.nvim + TypeScript compiler] stack, of which most of the memory usage comes from the TypeScript compiler. I'm not sure how that compares to Eclipse. But I'm more concerned about typing latency, where I _do_ only care about Vim itself because all the LSP stuff is asynchronous.