The reason is a large number of stable and secure libraries and frameworks to rely on. More on reddit.com

Java offers an unmatched combination of stability, maintainability, performance, and observability, all of which are very important for "serious" server-side software. If anything, there are too few serious competitors to Java, not too many. Aside from niches that Java is not a great fit for (say, signal processing) the real question is when is Java not used. In many cases it's because the requirements are such that those qualities above aren't needed -- the software is small, or isn't intended to be around for long, or can be slow, or is simple enough to not require deep observability -- so then there are many alternatives, and people pick based on other criteria. As to being modern, Java is the same age as JavaScript, slightly younger than Python, a decade younger than C++, and more than two decades younger than C (which will turn 50 soon), all of which are popular, and it is also younger than Haskell and a whole decade younger than Erlang, both of which, while unpopular, are still considered "edgy." In other words, age has nothing to do with utility. To the extent there are grumblings about Java, I'm guessing that's becasue it is so prevalent in the workplace that people associate it with work, which, naturally, can be boring at times, and so some look for novelty when hobby-programming. More on reddit.com

A few important reasons: Java is very backwards compatible. This means when a new version is released, in all likelihood, your existing code will just work. That's a huge deal to large organisations that have multiple projects and millions of lines of code. Java standardizes a lot like how things must be named, and even makes recommendations on code formatting. This means that all java code looks very similar, which makes the code easy to read. So when you swap people on projects, the learning curve isn't steep. Java is very verbose. This can be a pain in the ass when coding, but ByteArrayInputStream leaves little to the imagination. When you need to maintain code, that verbosity really helps. Java developer tools are excellent. They're frigging spectacular compared to most other languages Java has an enormous ecosystem that had evolved over many years. When starting a project, it's great knowing that most of your grunt work can be handled easily. See the apache software Foundation for tons of high quality tools. There's other reasons too but basically, going the java route is safe, reliable, and feature packed. That's what most people want. More on reddit.com

Java is one of the few languages I find easy to read. Yes, it is boilerplate heavy, and this may be an unpopular opinion, but I found Kotlin much harder to read than Java. While it’s easy to write code in Kotlin, features such as operator ovefloading and extension functions can ‘gaslight’ you during debugging some issue or reasoning about some behaviour. More on reddit.com