Is there any talk in the Java world of decoupling the runtime from the tzdata distribution? AFAIK, it is still coupled together and requires a tool to update the data files or you have to apply JRE updates (which must be published in time).

The tzdata updates usually 10+ times a year and a company actually operating in most of those zones needs to have a straightforward way to push out updates not only across all production systems, but across all production languages. This usually makes solutions that "transpile" the binary data into native source or otherwise embed the data into resources somewhere much more operationally expensive. Native solutions (e.g., pytz in Python) that can be pointed to an directory to pick up the tzdata binary files are a good middle-ground, as it decouples the logic from the data.

Operationally, you need to be able to deploy the updates very quickly. Every year there are data updates that occur a few days before the DST change. If you have a lengthy dev/beta/prod rollout process to a very large number of machines, this can bite you. Just this week, Chile and Turkey are making changes, so prepare to update :)