As some of the other comments in the thread allude, this is quite a rudimentary (or rather outdated) understanding of how Java GC operates and ends up (unfortunately) turning an otherwise good comparison into a straw-man argument.
As someone who's worked with Java from the days where "If you want superhigh performance from Java without GC pauses, then just turn off GC and restart your process every X hours" was considered a "valid" way to run high-performance Java systems, I think the changes Java has made to GC are among the biggest improvements to the framework/JVM and have contributed vastly to JVM stability and growth over the last decade.
Fundamentals of Java about data/class layouts in memory have remain same for decades. So author is right at big picture.
> I think the changes Java has made to GC are among the biggest improvements to the framework/JVM and have contributed vastly to JVM stability and growth over the last decade.
This is of course true. However the point is for Java it is absolute necessity for Go it may be nice to have.
As someone who's worked with Java from the days where "If you want superhigh performance from Java without GC pauses, then just turn off GC and restart your process every X hours" was considered a "valid" way to run high-performance Java systems, I think the changes Java has made to GC are among the biggest improvements to the framework/JVM and have contributed vastly to JVM stability and growth over the last decade.