You are right that this can be a major problem with the JVM and working around it can be a lot of work. But you need to consider what kind of system we're talking about in this particular case.

This is a persistent message queue for log messages. Messages are coming in sequentially and subscribers read them sequentially. It makes zero sense to keep tons of messages in memory inside complex data structures as they are not indexed or searched or analyzed.

So in this particular case it's not actually a workaround. It's just sensible design and I wouldn't do it any differently in C++ either.