It's not that much more work. You have to be careful with a few concepts (like SAM/Functional interfaces), but most of the time you can just write in Kotlin. I want to support both because a lot of companies are probably like the one I work for, where there are a lot of java-devs, and a few of them are pushing for kotlin. This seems like a good compromise to me.
Play was two different projects tho? There is only one Javalin source.