Some satellites do run higher level code on the payload side. My company also uses it for our open source telemetry package. That code is typically very isola

Some satellites do run higher level code on the payload side. My company also uses it for our open source telemetry package. That code is typically very isolated though. If it crashes entirely, you can't exactly send someone over to hit the reset button or re-upload the image so you need some sort of hardened supervisory code running on radiation tolerant hardware. The big gotcha though is that space-capable hardware is frequently at least a generation behind commodity stuff so you don't really have a lot of overhead to deal with interpreters or VMs. This is less of an issue on cube sats where you don't care (as much) if it doesn't work and the mission is very short and non-critical. On the bus side (the part that controls the satellite's support systems, thrusters, etc) having garbage collection kick off while making orbital adjustments is no bueno. Don't really have to say much more than that.