Ha, I'm from that generation of developers who have the mental model of what is actually happening on the hardware level when you run the program. Doesn't necesarilly mean I overoptimize or think about struct fields offsets or cache branching, but I do have this in my mental model and just can't unlearn it.

When I think about how many stuff needs to be moved in cpu/memory/io bus just to launch simple "Hello, World" in Java - I just cannot accept it. I do realize that for large programs that overhead is small, but still the JVM concept is something I want to avoid as much as possible. Plus the sheer scale of Java SDK and amount of legacy and complexity behind it exceeds my treshold of "avoiding complexity" by orders of magnitude. And the nail to the coffin of "no java" stance is, of course, experience with desktop Java applications. Consistenly the worst UX experience and performance I've seen in 25 years among desktop apps.