And then you find out pjlegato switched to Elixir, where he gets lightweight libraries by default, real threading, no GILs, no callback hell, uses all the cores trivially, in a single process, -and- gets a concurrency model that doesn't suck, baked in distribution that doesn't suck, better VM introspection, fault tolerance second to none, tail call optimization, soft real time performance, higher order functions, and glorious, glorious pattern matching.
Or maybe not, but just sayin', you're making assumptions in trying to defend Java there. It's enough to say "You don't have to write Java that way", and then find reasons why Java stands on its own ("It's the lingua franca of software development", and related, is the best I can come up with, but eh), rather than attacking a strawman by assuming what traits the language(s) he switched to are and comparing Java against those.