The problem is not java the lang. It's the java developers. Looks like they moved on to do angular now.
PS: No, yet-another-js-library-to-replace-jquery is not considered tooling. No, yet-another-replacement-for-grunt/bower/yeoman is not a good sign of the ecosystems. Java has Maven since 2004.
Python tools don't even come close. Ditto with .NET NuGet. Find me a tool that can compare feature by feature with Maven and still relevant for a long time.
With Java, you write a lot of syntax to get static typing, but it's worth it because static typing! Then you throw static typing away (because now it's to restrictive I suppose?) to use XML files which must be structured a certain unpredictable way or you'll cry at the traceback you receive, and pray your imminent Google search can make sense of it all.
I'm not sure how I feel about Java so far, although there are problems that I want to solve in the Java backend at work for future scalability, since the quality of code is actually worse than our frontend code currently.
I'm a systems engineer, but I have to touch some Java code from time to time. I always have an hard time with the amount of indirection an average Java developer can reach. Luckily a few smart guys were hired recently and they have past experience in contributing to the JVM and their approach to the code is completely different and much, much more simple to understand, and since they came onboard the performance of critical parts of our main application increased dramatically with a few lines of code instead of the previous 400 or so.
It probably has to do with the "enterprise" culture that tends to err on the side of overgeneralising things and applying far too much abstraction (Java came into being at a time when the OOP fad was gaining significant traction.) The standard library also being in that style encourages this too.
But things like Java4K suggest that it's definitely possible to do a lot in a tiny amount of code.