The java GC approach is somewhat unique compared to other languages. There are multiple GCs and pretty much all of them are moving collectors. That means the JVM fairly rarely ends up freeing memory that it's claimed. A big spike will mean that it holds onto the spike's amount of memory.

Many other GCed languages, such as swift, CPython, Go, do not use a moving collector. Instead, they allocate and pin memory and free it when not in use.

The benefit to the JVM approach is heap allocations are wicked fast on pretty much all its collectors. Generally, to allocate it's a check to see if space is available and a pointer bump. For the other languages, you are bound to end up using a skiplist and/or arena allocator provided by your malloc implementation. Roughly O(log(n)) vs O(1) in performance terms.

Don't get me wrong, the object header does eat a fair chunk of memory. Roughly double what another language will take. However, a lot of people confuse the memory which the JVM has claimed from the OS (and is thus reported by the OS) with the memory the JVM is actively using. 2 different things.

It just so happens that for moving collectors like the JVM typically uses more reserved memory means fewer garbage collections and time spend garbage collecting.