The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

In the very early days, Java was pushed into the mainstream long before it was ready. This left a foul taste as management demanded we jumped on the bandwagon while the trenches filled with frustration over many bugs in the early JVM's and language implementations and missing quality in core features.

It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it's maturity and capabilities at the time.

It did not feel as quirky as C++'s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?).

Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia's darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts.

Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.