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The sweet spot for Go is in the hundreds to a couple of thousand lines of code. Unix philosophy and all that. Leave the monolithic MLOC monstrosities to Java.

People write MLOC monstrosities in Java because they can. You get some boring financial topic and some sub-par programmers and they'll write as much garbage as the language can possibly sustain.

These things are a testament to how safe and simple Java is as a language.

Not having massive crappy code bases is a negative sign in terms of how reliable and easy to understand a language is.

None of the things you mentioned are "potentially dangerous hacks." Using maps as sets is common in many languages and there's nothing wrong with it. Adding a guard method to an interface is pretty clear and it works well, as well.

Yes, it's best to use the smallest tool (orthogonal language and libraries) for the job because it's less to test and maintain, and more likely to be correct.