So what am I missing? Or rather, what is the article missing? (I knew nothing about Kotlin before this article)
I mean, I wouldn't agree with the classification of any of those languages as the syntactic sugar of whatever. C is portable ASM, which is a big deal. C++ is object oriented C, which is a different paradigm and feels a lot more salty than C because of the increased complexity. Java was rather ambitious (safe to say overly so) and brought with it a lot of differences with C++ that were not just syntax (which is definitely sweeter).
What does Kotlin give me besides less verbose syntax and some nice compile time null checking?