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A lot of companies I'm speaking to (mostly Berlin/Germany based startups) have drank the "we have to use JS on the frontend anyways, and by going fullstack JS we can reduce our payroll since we can focus on only hiring JS devs and they magically work on ReactNative, the React web app and the Node.JS backend at the sime time" koolaid. Works super well for some, less so for others...

Edit: Explicitly added Node.JS since that's what they rave about for making it possible.

That's because Java is one of the top 3 adopted languages and is general purpose. A more relevant comparison would be between Node.js and Django, Rails or Laravel and as far as job stats go, eg. https://indeed.com, Node.js is everywhere.

i think it really depends on the industry - mine for example, most of the bigger players are running express apps on the FE (not 100% sure on backend, seems a mix of go/node and other things) - but why bother to run express/node on the frontend if you're not also going to leverage it on the backend.