Maybe now, but in the past you'd have to worry about things like running out of PermGen space. There were definitely more knobs than a typical container environment.
I did qualify my statement with "in the past." I was pointing out that Java did, in fact, have a lot of annoying knobs to turn. tbrock was advocating against having such knobs as they make deploying a language diffcult. The fact that Java removed one of the annoying knobs doesn't disprove the fact that having such knobs is annoying.