How often do you launch a fresh terminal though? I start mine with a script to have favourite tabs ready at boot and then generally not much afterwards.

I use aliases that lazily load nvm when I actually want to use it. This converts the shell startup penalty into a node/npm startup penalty.

I wasn't actually aware of the impact. I measured the zsh startup time locally (with mvn active and commented out) and it indeed makes a difference (.39s -> .08s). Not that I would have noticed that without measuring :) - yes I'm an old geezer.

Thank you for the recommendation, I might then also be able to ditch sdkman as well.