https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8329862 cleaned up the launcher's native code to remove the checks for the presence of a JRE. Those checks were removed from the Windows and Unix variants of the launcher code. It looks like these checks weren't removed from the macosx variant of the launcher, probably due to an oversight. We currently have the following check only in macosx:

/* Does the app ship a private JRE in <apphome>/jre directory? */
JLI_Snprintf(libjava, sizeof(libjava), "%s/jre/lib/" JAVA_DLL, path);
if (access(libjava, F_OK) == 0) {
    JLI_StrCat(path, "/jre");
    JLI_TraceLauncher("JRE path is %s\n", path);
    return JNI_TRUE;
}

This should be removed from the the launcher's macosx code.