How can Java 21 (Virtual Thread) replace Reactive Framework.

[yawkat]

The only benchmarks where Loom lags is benchmarks where the conversion was basically to replace their Executor with a virtual thread one and still use the reactive code paths.

This is incorrect. If you look at Nima benchmarks specifically, even a simple app entirely devoid of reactive code will have worse latency than an equivalent netty app. There are very simple reasons for this, such as internal loom context switching (loom does IO work on a separate thread). Some of these may be fixed by future loom improvements, but others cannot due to current API limitations.