I agree wrt to Java. Because Java has been around for so long it has a lot of emotional baggage that I think makes people reflexively dislike it. But, modern Java with any of the micro frameworks or something like Spring boot, plus jOOQ makes for a very easy and productive backend. And because Java has been around for so long, if you run into edge cases like parsing a weird file format, there is probably a library out there. Kotlin has a lot of same advantages, plus a more expressive syntax if that's what someone is after.

Go is also works for the backend, but you have to get into the mindset that you're probably going to write a lot of code. That's fine, but it's a shift from many other languages. As someone who has programmed for 20+ years, I like the single way to do most things in Go. There's also a bit of elegance coming full circle through many languages where a for loop is once again just a for loop.

And maybe I'm showing my age, but I also completely agree that backend languages need strong typing. The other option is significant test coverage, but we have all seen how that goes in practice. Code without strong typing always feels like it's meant to be written once and thrown away because it's so hard to read later. And, this style fits with how UIs often work where the life of a product will end up with many UIs on the same backend.