J4 is fairly decent if you want a tanky top or jungle with good ganks & decent damage. His clear speeds are still slow compared to Nid & Kindred, but he has great utility even if he's a bit behind.
During a few viewer games on a stream I frequent, we won because I was able to catch one of the enemy carries in my ult before teamfights & turn teamfights into 4v4, even 3v4 a few times despite being 3 to 4 levels behind everybody else. Most of those games, the enemy team had a Plat 3 while highest rank on our team was Gold 4.