Sounds like a completely misinformed opinion to me.
System memory issues should not be in issue in this modern age.
Java's garbage collection? Only a usually matter upon first upload of vertices to the GPU and it only applies to CPU bound resources of which a VBO is not.
Past that? GPU memory is again hardly a concern. Wurm isn't here dealing with million vertex models, with 4096x4096 textures each.
This isn't the goddamn 90's. One should not be catering towards people with ancient hardware and if the renderer is so bad that it can't even do the simplest optimizations, ya know like any culling at all, then yikes I say for the future of this game.