Literally every layer on top of raw machine code adds overhead. Whether that's the JVM, garbage collection, shared libraries that aren't specialized for your ap

Literally every layer on top of raw machine code adds overhead. Whether that's the JVM, garbage collection, shared libraries that aren't specialized for your application, VMs running on a shared server, even operating systems themselves. All of these layers trade computational work for developer work. By doing so, they reduce code complexity and allow much more advanced software to be written and distributed to more platforms with less friction. Time that isn't spent debugging an application on the Nth platform can be spent improving features. We can debate whether an individual one of these tradeoffs is a good one, but layering is a fundamental aspect of software engineering and it's hilariously misguided to suggest that it's an inherently bad thing to do.