People have an irrational hate for it based on the enterprise cruft and horrible third party frameworks you can just completely ignore if you build a new thing
It's not good for commandline stuff but for a long running small service it is pretty great
It is much more practical to choose a language that does not have a terrible history of poor API design to begin with.
What language that's been around for long enough to have a large ecosystem doesn't have a terrible history of poor api design?
But sure, if you pick a really new language, you do get the chance to be that history for future generations
..and I'm generally a Java-hater as the language itself is objectively inferior to my beloved C#.. but even then there are situations where Java is a better choice.