it’s still comically bad compared to various alternatives, even apples-to-apples alternatives like C#.

I'd be interested to hear why. IMO Java has the superior ecosystem, runtime(s!), and community. The best part is that you don't even HAVE to use java to access all this - you can just use kotlin, groovy, scala,.... instead.

In terms of the language itself, while it (still) lacks some more modern language features, it has improved massively in that area as well, and they're improving at a significant rate still. It also suffers from similar issues as PHP, where it has some old APIs that they don't want to get rid of (yet?), but overall it's a solid language.