Yeah. Java is pretty solid as a language / platform IMO. I gave up on it when Oracle fumbled the ball with JavaFX, but I agree a lot of the criticisms aren't really issues.
The one that gets me is the microservices. I've never really understood it. I can build a Java project with a bunch of small, composable modules and things like refactoring across the entire codebase are trivial. There's no rule saying you can't put your (ex) auth API in a separate module and bundle it independently at build time, right?
Or, if you want to use the same module in multiple projects, formalize the versioning and bundle it as a library.
I think the thing that drives microservices adoption is that it's easy to start out without any planning or API design. You just yeet some code out, publish the REST "API" via Swagger, and call it a "service". There's no versioning, no clear rules, etc.. All of that becomes tomorrow's problem.
Then, since you don't have proper API versioning or anything, you start to end up with things like mono-repos to ensure your "API" changes aren't going to break anyone relying on your "service".
Seriously. Microservices in mono-repos. It's like a bad joke.
Microservices make more sense in dynamically typed languages without a good module system because they turn into spaghetti mess after 20k lines. The worst giant spaghetti projects I've touched were PHP, Perl, and JS. If you can't put boundaries within your app you don't really have a choice but to put them at service level.
In Java (and similar) "enterprise" languages you have static typing, access modifiers, a quality module system. It's trivial to split your app into multiple independent units.
And the JVM + CLR are designed for giant monstrosities. They use a compact bytecode format, zip their dependencies, and do crazy things like runtime code unloading and in-memory string deduplication.
We have Java apps with millions of lines of cruft that run fine on reasonable machines. Totally anecdotal but our worst disasters are dynamically typed stuff like node where the only way to know what the objects being passed around look like is to see them in a debugger. And with JS the "module system" always devolves into webpack concatenating everything into one giant file. It's pretty gross
The one that gets me is the microservices. I've never really understood it. I can build a Java project with a bunch of small, composable modules and things like refactoring across the entire codebase are trivial. There's no rule saying you can't put your (ex) auth API in a separate module and bundle it independently at build time, right?
Or, if you want to use the same module in multiple projects, formalize the versioning and bundle it as a library.
I think the thing that drives microservices adoption is that it's easy to start out without any planning or API design. You just yeet some code out, publish the REST "API" via Swagger, and call it a "service". There's no versioning, no clear rules, etc.. All of that becomes tomorrow's problem.
Then, since you don't have proper API versioning or anything, you start to end up with things like mono-repos to ensure your "API" changes aren't going to break anyone relying on your "service".
Seriously. Microservices in mono-repos. It's like a bad joke.