And sure, it is welcome from a dev POV on one hand, though from an ecosystem perspective, more languages are not necessarily good as it multiplies the effort required.
Especially given how the language was criticised back in 1996.
Are Java AOT compilation times just as fast as Go?
Why not? Machine code is not all that special - C++ and Rust is slow due to optimizations, not for machine code as target itself. Go "barely does anything", just spits out machine code almost as is.
Java AOT via GraalVM's native image is quite slow, but it has a different way of working (doing all the Java class loading and initialization and "baking" that into the native image).