Not that I disagree with what you're saying, but I thought you'd find it interesting: you can dump the JIT assembly from Hotspot JVM pretty readily to make sure things like inlining are happening as you'd expect.
You can also view the entire compiler internals in a visual way using the igv tool. You can actually get much better insight into how your code is getting compiled on a JVM like the GraalVM than with a C compiler.
However, I will admit that this is very obscure knowledge.
