Actually the story I heard is that Kotlin/Native exists simply because Intel was laying off a compiler team in St Petersburg around that time, so they came on t

Actually the story I heard is that Kotlin/Native exists simply because Intel was laying off a compiler team in St Petersburg around that time, so they came on the market as a group and could be picked up easily and quickly. And they wanted to push into iOS. Could they have done a SubstrateVM/GraalVM competitor instead? Yeah probably, but that's a very different project to adding another backend to Kotlin. Given they already decided to make Kotlin "multi-platform" (i.e. js backend) instead of making Java more portable, it then made sense to go the whole way. JetBrains also developed TeaVM and arguably it'd have been better to just invest in JVM related tooling, and keep Kotlin as a JVM language. But I think they like the idea of it being its own ecosystem. Who wouldn't, in their position?