Meh, not a disaster in practice. Our team has spent less than 10 minutes thinking about this the later years.

For server stuff one points to a matching dockerfile, for distributed stuff one bundles the jre with the tools since java9.

Integers increasing by one each 6th months doesn’t sound too difficult, but to each their own.

Well lets see. It started off as JDK 1.0. The became J2SE 1.2. Then later Java SE 6. That took like a decade. Then they had sporadic releases for 5 years or so. Now they want a release every 6 months. Never mind the licensing/ownership issues over the years and now the proliferation of multiple distributions that are basically the same.