Yeah, more or less. I'm not complaining about the JVM directly, but rather about what typical Java software, of which Kafka is one example, looks like, at least

Yeah, more or less. I'm not complaining about the JVM directly, but rather about what typical Java software, of which Kafka is one example, looks like, at least in my mind. Whenever I see JVM I think: Horrible user experience and tooling, bad memory footprint, slow to start and deploy, complex codebase where it's impossible to debug issues, huge Docker images, complicated configuration and tuning options that doesn't work out of the box, dependency hell, and so on. It's the typical enterprise package for managers that don't want to get fired - Nobody got ever fired for buying IBM. When I see something like NATS - A few thousand lines of code and a 40MB image, that makes me happy. It's a lightweight thing that "just works." That's why I stay away from anything JVM. And I acknowledge that I am totally biased and may be wrong in some cases, but that has been my experience.