[alaroldai]

An alternate interpretation of the same data - if you're committed to writing a program in a language that requires a runtime / does a lot of work on startup, writing a program that prints "Hello, World!" does not make the most effective use of that language and runtime.

Put that way, most of this post seems like a tautology: if you misuse the tools you are given, of course you're going to get bad results!

It seems reasonable to me that a language should make the assumption that the programmer's use case matches the languages strengths, so by default any runtime setup / bookkeeping / teardown code should run. Failure to remove that extra "complexity" isn't a failure of the toolchain, it's a failure of the programmer to select the right tool for the job.

If the point the author was trying to make was that the complexity being added is never useful, this is not a post that argues that position. A cost / benefit discussion of the specific behaviours being supported by that complexity would be very interesting!