Because…it is? I’m a senior dev that’s mostly worked with Java and JS and my Java skills are in HIGH demand. Java may be passé in the startup world but so many businesses run on Java.

Not to mention Android development. Cross-platform apps haven’t fully filled all the lofty promises they made. Many apps are still being written and maintained in Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, and Swift.

Its pretty popular. A lot of people who are not writing Javascript and derivatives and working on Java based applications. E.g place I work would be a couple of applications in .net, some legacy stuff in Perl, data piplines in Go. Remaining 98% projects are all Java based.

The world runs on Java, think banks, airlines, trains networks, stock exchanges, goverment web services, emergency systems. Some you might know that are heavy users are netflix, stripe.

Probably because of Android and webservices.

you'd be hard pressed to not use Java in the world of financial services, and there are lots of boring, back-end systems in financial services that run Java

The Apache ecosystem is fairly Java-heavy, Android, etc..

To add to what others are saying, a lot of middleware is also done in Java.

Why wouldn't it? Contrary to what some very narrow circles believe, it's by far one of the most safe and mature ways to build scalable, performant, reliable, and long lived software. Especially on the middleware and backend side.