> as it sounds like Oracle/OpenJDK developers do not care anymore about backwards compatibility and looking to force people into not relying on system-wide libraries so they can start breaking things in newer versions without user-facing repercussions
Backward compatibility is of extreme importance, as always, but applications and libraries have had ways to bypass the documented API and hack into the runtime's internals. Which meant that the only way to achieve real backward compatibility was to change absolutely nothing. This is pretty much what happened for some time, not because anyone wanted it but because the investment in the platform decreased in Sun's dying days, and it took some years for Oracle to ratchet it back up. Now that the platform is under heavy development, even with the same commitment to backward compatibility, it is far from perfect because libraries have gotten used to hacking into the JDK. We are, however, taking steps to stop that, by encapsulating internals.
The new model is just better, and wasn't chosen because of this, but it is certainly another benefit.
Backward compatibility is of extreme importance, as always, but applications and libraries have had ways to bypass the documented API and hack into the runtime's internals. Which meant that the only way to achieve real backward compatibility was to change absolutely nothing. This is pretty much what happened for some time, not because anyone wanted it but because the investment in the platform decreased in Sun's dying days, and it took some years for Oracle to ratchet it back up. Now that the platform is under heavy development, even with the same commitment to backward compatibility, it is far from perfect because libraries have gotten used to hacking into the JDK. We are, however, taking steps to stop that, by encapsulating internals.
The new model is just better, and wasn't chosen because of this, but it is certainly another benefit.