Yes. this was my bad, got lost through all the logs. The logs are provided from Elastc's start-local script.
However, today I got access to newly installed Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS. Elasticsearch works here. The only different thing between Debian and Ubuntu VMs (despite the fact of different distros) I found that the new Ubuntu VM runs on kernel 6.8.0-60-generic, meanwhile the debian ones run on 6.1.0-37-amd64. Tried updating to 6.12.27+bpo-amd64, but it didn't seem to change anything. Also, both VMs run under VMware and I've checked and didn't find that LXC is in use.
Spent some hours digging around and seeing what different services are running and so on. Thought would be nice to understand the underlying cause, but if nothing appears, we'll just move on and have Ubuntu flavor specifically for elasticsearch 