I know exactly what modern Java looks like, and it could be beautiful. But… legacy cruft and lazy devs make it painful. And tech debt, let’s be honest.
I’d view a greenfield project rather differently, but those are unicorns.
The just-in-time compiler isn't bad, but the rest of it is. An optimized hot loop has the potential to emit better instructions than a C/C++ compiler not using PGO, but you're never going to see that in any real workload.
If you could rip out/avoid the garbage collector, give it the ability to use escape analysis to avoid heap-allocating every single object, and prevent it from implicitly making every function virtual, then maybe. But at that point, you might as well just a different language.
There's a difference between the JIT being able to emit better native code than an unguided compiler, and the language being as performant as another language. Java is never going to be as fast as C or C++, and that's something you can blame its design for.