> pattern matching ... In this regard Java had surpassed Kotlin by some margin.

I did just glance at Java's pattern matching; and yeah, it does look like it is a bit more powerful than Kotlin's pattern matching in that it can, at the same time, look for both type and a conditional. That's relatively neat - not something I've personally needed / wanted; but neat just the same :)

The JVM is a really nice virtual machine in how it lets us use both of these languages fully interchangeably to pick the one we like more.

I'm glad Java has been investing in some of these areas, too. Everyone improves when paradigms and new learnings are distilled.