As another poster mentioned, the new type inference is great. So is lambda support. Another is Lombok.... Yeah it's not official but we use it literally everywhere and it helps a ton with data classes especially.

Nullaway and a bunch of other linters will also save you from accidentally falling in one of the dusty corners.

RxJava and Java Streams are also very nice.

Anonymous classes are nice too I guess (although they're fairly limited).

Overall the java experience has improved massively in the last 5 years, but you need to know where to look. Highly recommend the two popular "awesome java" repos on GitHub for an overview