I don't know how I missed that all this time... I've going off the "zero/dot" releases of https://winpython.github.io/ this whole time.
That's actually the recommended way for Java applications nowadays. There is no official current JRE for end-users to download anymore - the newest version you can download from Oracle is 8 update 281. JDK is currently at version 16.
Does this mean that Oracle has decided that Java 8 is the last consumer version of Java?
Or like you've said that applications shouldn't use the OS level java installation?
AFAIK, it is for final applications whose main purpose isn’t to be used as development tools tied to whichever python environment it is installed in.
Hence and vb script that downloads python, they could have hosted the rat and downloaded that too rather than writing it line by line.
For example, JetBrains ships its own Java runtime for all of its IDEs.
In fact, the Python world would be simplified if "ship your own runtime and env" as part of your final application was the norm. The Python runtime and stdlib by itself is like 20-30MB packaged up or something. For certain applications (especially media asset rich ones), that's not that significant.