Supposedly es4x (powered by GraalVM) cracked the top-5 empower benchmarks, while no other Node/JS frameworks are in top-20/top-30 (iirc):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUJ85k3aEg4
The assertion in the ^ video (from the es4x author) is that node programs hop across the http/libuv/v8/etc. boundaries all the time, and that's the majority of the overhead, not actual business/program logic.
So, es4x sitting on graal brings all of those http/event loop/js runtime infra projects into a single optimizing VM.
My memory is ~fuzy on the details, but I believe I got our apollo server running running on es4x a few months back, and the latency was ~double node, which was still impressive IMO, but I didn't see the amazing gains that the author does. Not sure why.
he's famous for trolling the Node & Deno repos (i think he's banned from both). he also refuses to participate in the benchmarks (despite being able to score very well) because he says their methodology is flawed.