You're 2-3 orders of magnitude off for a JVM

Agreed. Along those same lines, their startup time claim "faster than go", gives me concern because the slowest part of go startup is the various GC-related initializations. If they are doing GC, then you would assume their times would be broadly similar.

smallest i've been able to get hotspot is 30mb with jlinking. But even graal native will still give you a few megabytes.