Not really what I meant. It's a "special case" because the sidecar container is a niche where the JVM doesn't work well. That doesn't mean you can't run JVM successfully elsewhere, which of course people do.

For example, you may be deploying a bunch of lean Go microservices that, at maximum, consume perhaps 20MB of memory each (peak). You can run 100 instances of said app and only consume 2,000MB, but add a big JVM that weighs, say, 200MB a piece, you now need 22,000MB of memory instead.

JVM startup time might be another factor, but I've not measured this.