I've been working almost exclusively in C++ @ Google since then.
Java looks much improved now. But I still feel like there's a culture of complexity and bloat in Java code ... But I work in the Chromium code base and it has the same problem :-)
Complexity and bloat definitely come with that, I think some folk get used to building EnterpriseTurboWidgetFactoryImpl type horrors and never consider the language doesn't need to do that kind of thing any more... Java being so backward compatible I think also means it doesn't do enough to discourage that either though, which is also a reason why Kotlin is so nice -- the lowest effort solution is miles more understandable.
Did it ever though? I feel this junk comes from the Spring side more than pure Java. I'd love to know a good way to get rid of it as Spring is everywhere.
Maybe it was old school Spring that started it (it seems to have seen a big uptick in enterprise grossness in the 2000s so its an interesting hypothesis), but even Spring has moved on from it.
No, Java has always had ExcessivePatternFactoryImpl-itis.
And what's worse is that the language never had good supports for the patterns that the community seemed to prescribe. So you had an insistence on value and transfer objects and JavaBeans with pointless getters and setters leaking out their eyeballs, but no language support for properties or automatically managing these data objects. Or a desire to push the visitor pattern etc. but no pattern matching constructs. Apart from generics, which ended up being excessively complex and practically turing complete, the language was horribly anemic and repeatitive.
People like to bash Java without understanding how things turned out as they did.
Personally I don't know how we ended up back at "RPC good" land after going through "REST good, RPC bad" for 5-10 years.