What is a use case for a soft reference in Java? Would it be useful to garbage collect non-critical items when a JVM has run out of memory in order to free up enough resources to perhaps dump critical information before shutting down the JVM?

Are they called soft-references in they they are soft and break when "put under stress" ie:the JVM has run out of memory. I understand weak references and phantom references but not really when these would be needed.

java jvm soft-references
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