It looks more like a decision on Oracle's part, since in the past manual install of the JRE occasionally failed when a prior version would not uninstall cleanly. Now, the uninstall is a separate step after the new version is installed. Ideally, Oracle will document the command-line switch to trigger a silent uninstall of all prior versions.
Until then, I guess I will have to modify the Solarwinds package to add a postinstallation uninstall of the previous two versions -- laptops are hard to keep current.