This seems to indicate that the "love" Kotlin gets is mostly fad motivated. Just like younger generations reject the haircuts and "cool" slang the older generation uses, the same younger generations reject older programming languages in favor of fashionable, glamorous, new ones.
Java went from being THE trendy fad language to the old fogey that everyone mocks and derides.
But the language itself never seemed “cool” — it horribly verbose even from the start. In fact, it's much better now than it was.
The author of "Joy, Inc." disagrees with you
https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/159...
Then there was VB 6, Delphi, Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Component Pascal, Smalltalk, Common Lisp and a few others more.
Big difference was that Sun was giving the JDK away for free every way they could.
Magazine CDs, conferences, sending them free by post, whatever.
I was on my last year and everything that had to do with distributed conputing or compiler development switched to Java. With teachers carrying Java branded bags.
The library. It had everything.
Garbage collection. You didn't have to keep track of when to free memory any more. If you were in C or C++, this meant a major headache just... went away. (If you were in Common Lisp, well, you never had that headache in the first place...)
I already used Oberon, Caml Light, Prolog and Smalltalk by then, but it was the way Sun was pushing it no matter what that actually made it mainstream, regarding GC adoption.
If I am not mistaken it was Guy Steele that stated it brought developers half way to Scheme.
As for the library I remember the first commercial Java collections based on the ongoing C++ STL work, before Java 1.2 adopted their own, with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones.
C++ on those days had each compiler vendor provide their own view of what a C++ framework should look like, and although RAII was already a thing, very few of them already offered some way of doing smart pointers, with the exception of COM wrappers.
And the recapitulation of emulated versus native Smalltalk UIs, with Swing versus SWT.
And since a large majority doesn't bother to read books like Filthy Rich Clients, the outcome isn't the best.
Au contraire!
So the article is saying that there is lots of Kotlin love from experienced developers (and this is as expected) but they were suprised to also see similar results with junior developers and students.
The text of the survey resluts page (linked in the article) makes the same point somewhat more clearly:
"In its early days Kotlin was being picked up mostly by experienced and professional developers, but since the announcement its usage has exploded with newer developers, especially students."