It also avoided licensing accidents. Oracles JDK always came with non free components and making the entire JDK non free made stories claiming that they "accidentally" triggered one of the commercial features and had to pay thousands in licensing fees unlikely.
I don't believe there are any commercial features left in Java 17. The last thing that required a flag to unlock commercial features was Java Flight Recorder, and that's now part of OpenJDK, the "-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures" is now gone completely from their documentation.
