Obviously its purpose was to support Java, but a number of languages - most prominently Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, Groovy and Ruby - run on the JVM. With perhaps the exception of Kotlin, these are not especially Java-like.

There is an interesting degree of independence. A lot of Java semantics is not baked into the JVM, and in the case of invokedynamic there was for a time a significant JVM feature that java didn't use.

The JVM is a pretty decent target for languages with garbage collection, objects (of some form), and methods / functions. Those facilities are useful for most languages these days, and provide a large degree of interoperability. I don't have to really thing about ruby calling java and back again, no calling conventions or issues with garbage.

It will be interesting to see whether WASM will support those kinds of features.