On the one hand it's a mismatch between the OS' (aka C) model where it's expected to have ~1 per cpu core and they come relatively heavy with a full C stack's worth of memory pages and kernel-level data structures; and the managed languages' desire to have zillions of them offered in their API as very lightweight concepts (not quite but close to as lightweight as allocating memory).
This is probably best thought of from the Erlang perspective; where an OS level thread is called a "scheduler" and what as an Erlang programmer you think of as a thread (called an "erlang process") of which you can have quite literally hundreds of thousands or millions in a large enough app.
Interestingly you can think of it as the counterpoint to the (IIRC) early 2000s Java migration from M:N threading model (where M java threads would map on N OS threads) to 1:1 threading model (where the JVM finally gave up the belief it knew better than the OS and just mapped them 1:1).
On the other hand, there's also lots to be said about async style APIs (eg: goroutines in Go, or the recent async work in Rust; admittedly neither are managed languages) creating lots and lots of very short lived threads where in a managed language context, the JIT would be able to prove interesting properties (eg: it's extremely short-lived, blocks the "parent" thread until it finishes and uses no memory shared with concurrent threads) and treat it in a way that bypasses the whole "save CPU state in the OS" context switch.
This is probably best thought of from the Erlang perspective; where an OS level thread is called a "scheduler" and what as an Erlang programmer you think of as a thread (called an "erlang process") of which you can have quite literally hundreds of thousands or millions in a large enough app.
Interestingly you can think of it as the counterpoint to the (IIRC) early 2000s Java migration from M:N threading model (where M java threads would map on N OS threads) to 1:1 threading model (where the JVM finally gave up the belief it knew better than the OS and just mapped them 1:1).
On the other hand, there's also lots to be said about async style APIs (eg: goroutines in Go, or the recent async work in Rust; admittedly neither are managed languages) creating lots and lots of very short lived threads where in a managed language context, the JIT would be able to prove interesting properties (eg: it's extremely short-lived, blocks the "parent" thread until it finishes and uses no memory shared with concurrent threads) and treat it in a way that bypasses the whole "save CPU state in the OS" context switch.