The article was written in 2016 (from the URL). Have some of the authors criticisms been addressed in the latest release? I know that startup time for Julia is now much faster (and also faster than my IPython profile from anaconda).
JIT overhead/startup time is still comparably large. There is https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl that helps reduce this overhead in user libraries. The base library precompiles quite a few methods already, so the performance deficit relative to C and Python on Julia 1.2 is half that quoted in the article, and unchanged by statically compiling.
Personally, I do a lot of computational geometry in Julia and I really don't care so much about these kinds of small overheads since actual computation time is the dominant factor. I imagine if Julia was designed for scripting in Unix environments this would be a bigger deal, but I think most people in the Julia community care more about how to manage several gigabytes of data in RAM/cache and run some analysis quickly, e.g. composable multithreading in 1.3.