You're not wrong, but with Java evolving rapidly, we're in a situation where there are dozens of commonly used JVM versions in the wild... being able to ship th

You're not wrong, but with Java evolving rapidly, we're in a situation where there are dozens of commonly used JVM versions in the wild... being able to ship the most recent JVM (which can be as little as 25MB depending on which JDK modules you depend on) with your application not only allows you to benefit from using modern language features, but it also makes your application safer by using the latest runtime with the most up-to-date security fixes, not to mention performance and testing becomes a lot easier when you only have one JVM version to worry about. Also, you can have both options. I have a somewhat popular Java app that I distribute as a tiny jar (300KB, requires Java 9+) and as a stand-alone app (packaged with jlink, around 35MB including JDK 11) - and users can choose which one they want.