Except that this actually happened wrt. a whole lot of application code. Sure, Java was slow and clunky but at least it was free of the memory unsafety that plagued C/C++. What was the mainstream "safe" alternative? There was no Rust back then, even Cyclone (the first memory-safe C style language) was only released in the mid-2000s.
Before Sun Java in 1995, companies built enterprise CRUD apps with "safe" memory languages using MS Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, and xBase languages like dBASE and FoxPro. This allowed them to develop line-of-business apps without manually managing memory in C/C++.
They claimed they fixed it a dozen times, starting with JDK 1.4, and continued to claim that with every major release since.
Getting the performance benefits of data oriented programming patterns is very exciting to me for allowing Java to run totally different classes of applications than haven't been practical until now.
Anyways, besides your very questionable "experience" with java, it literally runs half of the internet, and has by far the most mature and performant GC out of any platform, no one else is even close in this category.
Not even S3 in us-east-1 at its gobsmacking RPS rates had issues with garbage collection.
No special coding approaches were taken to achieve that, just standard stuff.
It didn't displace C-family languages on desktop OSes. There was a brief wave of Java-first desktop apps and people generally hated the UI toolkits and lack of first-party-feel and they went away.
And on the server, it was just one of many non-C things like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. Java became a standard "our dynamic language is too slow, port it to something else" destination but honestly the interpreted languages did more for killing C/C++ from a perspective of "CPUs are fast enough, and we're not CPU bound usually, just write in whatever's easiest."
And now we have a whole wave of "rewrite something off of the JVM, or off of Go, or off of some other GC'd language in Rust" projects because "just let the CPU use the spare cycles to GC has never been fully realized.
I think you vastly overestimate the size of that wave. Rust is a novelty in a specific niche and is changing/will change the low-level programming niche, but it won't noticeably alter how general business programming goes, not at all.