Indeed. It's weird they write so much with addressing the elephant.

So lets discuss it...

From the start I thought that the TechEmpower Benchmarks were testing all the metrics the JVM is good at, and non the JVM is bad at (mainly: memory usage, start-up time, container size). I got the idea back then than they were a JVM shop (could not confirm this on their current website).

Lately the JVM contenders are not longer at the top. And the benchmark contains many contenders with highly optimized implementations that do not reflect real life use.