Some folks have such a Java allergy that they rather endure the pains of NDK tooling, than accept a bit of Java on their efforts, I imagine.
Where the sad truth is that just the debugging features of the JDK alone make it worth using it even for just using C libraries. You can separate the C libraries, restart them without losing memory, communicate with them at least as efficient as through RPC ...
Memory management means that you can just inspect any piece of memory, even through code.
AND it's statically typed, unlike the one other environment that even tries to do this.
I think it is more of JVM thing than Java only. Maybe because of enterprise scale, rather than being resource aware minimalist solution.