I was on the Java hate train till I was forced to use it. It became my favorite language. For being so old, Java has avoided feature creep and bad decisions that make old code painful to deal with.

Sometimes I work on 10+ year old areas of codebase and it's fine. Compared to dumpster fire of 10 year old JS/Python/C++ it's paradise.

I use lombok judiciously to avoid getters/setters, the cruftiest part of Java. Newer versions of Java are quite pleasant.

Java is extremely mature. I pull in a library and it "just works" 99% of the time. No worries about the version of Java is was built for or missing native dependencies. Practically every language falls short of the polished user experience in Java.

I don't like Kotlin because the non-Android experience is an afterthought and it's a captured language by Google and Jetbrains. Java has a lot more hands at the wheel.