Yes, but as someone who ran a medium-sized server (200ish players), depending on what your map looked like, you occasionally found yourself spending a lot of time doing GC tuning, especially back in java 7 days when we didn't even have the first generation of G1GC.

Ah, good times. I currently work in Hadoop and it's honestly stupid how much tuning a Spark job is like tuning a Minecraft server (from the JVM level anyway). Life's path is strange sometimes.

It was, although it got bitten at one update explicitly by the GC: entity positions moved from a bunch of arrays, to a single Position() class for each entity, leading to memory allocations that murdered performance.

But then again, that's a problem you'd get without GC too, just maybe a bit less harsh/unpredictable.

Yes, the original Java edition is still in Java. There's now a C++ edition called bedrock as well.

Yes, there are plenty of games written in Java, but afaik there are no big game engines written in it. I'd love to be proven wrong regarding this.