Selenium based on Java? That’s the first time I hear that. And what the library is based on is really not of interest. Both “talk to” the DOM of a website.
Now the Selenium ecosystem is (much) older and there’s pros and cons because of that. The browser support is much wider than PlayWright, for example. Whether or not that’s relevant depends on your organization.
PlayWright works on engines, not browsers, and thus allows testing of Webkit on Windows, while you cannot test Safari on Windows using SeleniumLibrary. Another big benefit (to me) of PlayWright testing against the (vendored) engines is that things don’t randomly break when either Selenium, a SeleniumDriver or some browser is updated.
Also something to consider is that PlayWright has a wider scope than SeleniumLibrary. SeleniumLibary only works on the DOM, by design. PlayWright also has access to the network layer, so you can access the REST calls going back and forth and you can do things like wait for no network traffic for some timeframe.
In addition, PlayWright has support for ShadowDOM and iframes, which can be of importance.
As to faster and more reliable, PlayWright is generally the better choice for those criteria, due to its in-build waiting and auctionabilty checks.