Lambdas saved the language. Java 6 was the kingdom of nouns. You couldn't pass statements or expressions, so instead you had to create classes that happen to contain what you really wanted. Async code was nearly unreadable because the code that matters is spread out and buried.
This was said in other threads under the article, but we've definitely made huge strides in more efficient typing.
The general narrative of "early Java typing hurt development productivity" to "high throughput developers (e.g. web) jumped ship to untyped languages" to "ballooning untyped legacy codebases necessitated typing" to "we're trying to do typing more intelligently this go around" seems to track with my experience.
Generics, lamdas, duck typing, and border typing through contracts / APIs / interfaces being available in all popular languages drastically changes the typing experience.
As came up in another comment, I believe the greatest pusher of untyped languages was the crusty ex-government project engineer teaching a UML-modeling course at University.
To which students, rightly, asked "Why?" And were told, wrongly, "Because this is the Way Things Are Done." (And to which the brightest replied, "Oh? Challenge accepted.")
