I routinely run my fairly and complex java UIs clamped to 256M of memory, and startup time is measured in a handful of seconds. Distribution size is not great I'll admit, unless you go to considerable effort to slim the JRE down.
I feel distribution size like, users should have a JRE on their machine. Same way native apps expect you to already have a bunch of existing modules already installed as well. Or at least, if many apps were all using Java, you'd only install a JRE once, and then keep getting the non JRE bundles, so size of distribution would be a lot less.
What I mean is, at least for Java apps, this is a possibility. In Electron world, even though almost everyone has Chrome installed, you can't share it, you need to keep bundling the whole thing over and over again.
