> they could have optimized away theoretically. For a hello-world program, this is true, you do not need any of the features that usually come in the language

> they could have optimized away theoretically. For a hello-world program, this is true, you do not need any of the features that usually come in the language runtime - no garbage collection, no runtime memory safety, no runtime introspection, et cetera. This stems directly from the fact that many of these languages have borrowed features from Lisp, which has the whole language (GC, compiler, debug functions, etc..) always available for the code. And that, considering your point of view, might be a feature, not a bug - especially if your program, having a runtime of its own, actually produces its own stacktrace, allows you to interactively inspect values of variables throughout the stack, and - in case of some runtimes - is capable of opening up its own debugger for you to perform introspection and issue analyzing in.