I was almost with you up until the end then I had to just shake my head. I mean, it's readable syntax and doesn't require some crazy new sigils or operators, it's "fine" though I'm also shaking my head at the scope rules for these bindings. Similarly I'm ok with the "fine" syntax of Optional, and being explicit with my Optional.orElse()'s, rather than introducing an 'elvis operator' or some bikeshedded derivative. Though I wouldn't mind such things -- I'm glad Java keeps evolving useful things anyway, but it does wear on you (or at least me) to have to speak them (or even to tell your IDE to speak them on your behalf) as if your mouth was full of sand or to read them as if they're a high school student's essay obviously padded to reach some word count minimum.
If I came across this new thing organically, I could go "ah, neat, we have that now" and not necessarily need to go look up the JEP (meanwhile Python's PEP 636 had me going wtf) -- though over time I'd expect to come across it in a negative context where the original programmer made a scope mistake because they didn't read the JEPs, or because they tried to make a change without their IDE's assistance where through various means it could have pointed out shadowing or scope concerns, that I now have to fix.
It's in no minor part thanks to Java's verbosity that the overall Java ecosystem is so verbose. Having mostly non-confusing syntax whose meaning you can mostly guess at on first exposure is nice, yes, but isn't so helpful for the more important aspect of having non-confusing programs. For that you really want a more concise and tasteful language over a verbose one. Anyway, I've found that for anything non-trivial about the program itself, I'm going to need an IDE because the meat of the thing is going to be verbosely spread out in many places (sometimes for good reasons, at least in the Java world). Sure, after I acquire the mountain of (program) context, I can review small changes even on paper printouts, but that's true of most anything.
Verbosity is not a good property for a language to have in general -- Java itself admits this, otherwise we wouldn't have so many shortcuts in syntax like omitting this, or java 7's diamond operator or try-with-resources or catching multiple exceptions or for-each syntax, or java 8's lambdas and special syntax for simple lambdas, or java 9's var, or... And of course, almost always in some other more concise language a concept is much clearer. There's a reason pseudo-code isn't written to look like Java.