Honestly, Java has a lot going for it. Amazing library ecosystem. Simple to learn, like Go but with essential quality-of-life improvements. Community without PLT sadists. Fast as all hell when written with care. Vast variety of jobs. Super-polished dev tooling.

I know there problems too (verbose, OOP and enterprise over-design, some horrible legacy systems) but Java is as strong as ever I think.

I'm interested, have you worked in Java before on a bad project and have scars, or have you built up a negative impression from afar?