And in hindsight and after 15 years of cleaning up the mess we know that they just needlessly made a generation of developers suffer through primitive abstractions.
And Java is not a badly designed language at all, it did make several tradeoffs at places for various reasons, but it had a clear design goal and I think it did live up to it.
The most glaring issues were fixed in Java5 (similar to how golang just had their generics story improved). It took us all the way to Java8 to have a semi-pleasant language. I'm still waiting to see if Golang's generics are good enough to make abstractions/monadic operations similar to the Java's Streams widespread. If memory serves, basic pattern matching is coming in Java20, only 12+ years after Scala.
In contract to, say, virtual threads, a lot of these are language-level features. So they could have been done _much_ earlier. A generation of developers had their taste for abstractions skewed by the early days Java. Doing the job of the compiler in their heads. Now the next generation finds itself in the same situation with Golang.
I think this slow moving is really an advantage for Java, such a widely used language can’t allow breaking changes willy-nilly so any language feature will effectively become written in stone. Also, surprisingly many things can be expressed purely by “objects with method” APIs (Steele’s growing a language)
A new language on the other hand could have actually iterated fast because relatively few programs are written for them in the early years, go is just not a good language.