One annoyance with Java(and Kotlin too) is that it's pretty much the only language left that you really ought to use a specialized IDE with while pretty much every other language(including C#) you can get adequate support in VS Code or Emacs.
You can get shitty support with just syntax coloring for anything and anywhere of course.
And I'd say a third thing that matters as much as IDE and syntax is the wealth of libraries. Not just common things like consuming a rest API. But also specialised things like dealing with spreadsheets, music, whatever your domain cares about.
It’s still not what the top IDEs can provide but it’s way more than syntax highlighting and since everything is open source it’s improving a lot faster than the commercial market.
Might be that as complexity grows you need more and more IDE features to deal with it, but that's a symptom of older codebases being in Java more than it's a fault of the language itself, right?
Using IDEs since mid-90's, and I used to know XEmacs quite well.