With over 15 years of professional experience since then, my perspective has shifted: Java demonstrates its strength when stability, performance, and scalability are required (e.g. bloody enterprise)
A common misconception comes from superficial benchmarking. Many focus solely on memory consumption, which often provides a distorted picture of actual system efficiency.
I can point to EU-scale platforms that have reliably served over 100 million users for more than a decade without significant issues. The bottleneck is rarely the language itself, it is the depth of the team’s experience.