Don't you think their actual advantage is that they are compiled to native code?

Not necessarily. To me the actual advantage is that they are times, if not tens of times, faster than the semi-equivalent JS tool.

People love to downplay long startup times or longer runtimes ("Who cares if it takes 1s to start?" and "It takes 17s vs. 1s, big deal, you are overreacting!") but it does add up with time and makes people dissociate and stop caring. I've seen it (and it happened to me as well).