Java has the misfortune (especially in older versions of the language) of limited syntax that encourages bloated frameworks that promise to marginally decrease

Java has the misfortune (especially in older versions of the language) of limited syntax that encourages bloated frameworks that promise to marginally decrease boilerplate, combined with a VM that's robust enough to actually handle the bloat fairly gracefully. If you ignore that stuff and write Java programs in a straightforward way (accepting its verbosity, or possibly using code generation instead of runtime frameworks in places where lisp folks would use a bunch of macros), and avoid unnecessary heap allocations, they can be pretty fast.