The JVM has amazing, mature tooling, and a bunch of existing compile-to languages. If the goal is to do a productive exploration with some toys, that’s a good place to start.
Probably not justified, but that’s a hassle I’d want to avoid if I had any plans to support Unicode.
Plenty of people liked it then I agree, can’t really understand why, because the simplicity argument just moved the complexity into libraries.
Java predates ISO C++, and the UNIX world was a mess of K&R C, and half backed ISO C89.
Design patterns were invented for Smalltalk and C++, as much as people like to blame Java for them.