> I’m yet to forgive them for type erasure.

I could agree or disagree depending on how 'type erasure' is defined.

I'm firmly in the static-typing camp: Do the type-checking. Use the type information to generate good code, then throw away the types.

> And optionals.

What's your beef with Optionals? They didn't exactly go all-in on it. All the standard library stuff still returns nulls. I have one or two small beefs with Optionals, but my current peeve is IntelliJ warning me that I use them. (I KNOW I use them! I'm telling my callers which parameters they can include and which ones they can leave out.)