A self-contained binary has everything it needs to function and is typically much smaller. If I’m not using Java for my work, then I don’t want to be encumbered with having to think about it, or stay up to speed with releases and everything else.

I like to see projects with as few dependencies as possible, even when statically linked. Bringing in the JDK when it’s not needed is tiresome.

ruby on the other hand gets quite a bit of flack as well, because most distributions are so far behind the official ones. that's probably why an embedded ruby binary has become a thing.

Especially virtualenvs are an axe I like to grind.