I’m sorry to be this blunt: but have you actually read the article?
It mentions this, yes, but only to differentiate it from a warm start where reuse happens. The measurements are explicitly about cold start.
Here is the full context:
When Does Cold Start Happen?
The very first cold start happens when the first request comes in after deployment.
After that request is processed, the instance stays alive to be reused for subsequent requests.
And then further down (before the actual measurements):
How Slow Are Cold Starts?
The following chart shows the comparison of typical cold start durations for common languages across three cloud providers
Again: have you read the article?
Go is actually one of the languages measured. Go is actually measured in both articles, and in both articles it’s measured cold start times are slightly worse compared to JS.
I’m not trying to shill for JS here. I was quite surprised when I first learned about the low cold start times of JS. But the facts don’t seem to support the general statement that “languages that compile to native binaries have a faster cold start”, at least not in the case of JS.
I think it actually shows how much crazy optimization work must have been done on the JS V8 engine and on the cloud provider’s side to enable these times.
Doesn’t mean that I would opt for using JS for cloud functions but it’s impressive nonetheless.