I might agree if you're speaking about Java since ~11 or so.
One of my biggest complaints about Java, especially before the lambda syntax caught on, was how many extra files it made me create. I felt like every project had lots of wrapper classes, and people would make a make a file for each class.
You could argue that that was "bad" Java and they should have nested the classes, and that's fair enough, but it certainly wasn't uncommon Java. It artificially makes the language feel way too verbose if you have ten files more than would be necessary in a comparable language.
Once people started to embrace the lambda syntax, I feel that Java got immediately more fun to write; you weren't constantly creating one-off instantiations of interfaces or classes (well, at least not explicitly anyway), and the language felt considerably more streamlined.
Java 21 is actually one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite awhile in the tech world, in that I'm actually having fun writing Java. Sealed interfaces and record patterns make some code considerably more pleasant, and I actually have been writing Java in my free time, which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.
ETA:
https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 See! I even said I would never enjoy writing Java!