Programmed over the years in almost all mainstream programming languages at one time or another.

Saying this, Java was and is in many ways one of the best ecosystems to write software out there, if not the best (when it comes to server side software).

Maven is my favorite build systems so far: Default directory layout means everything has its place, IDEs can easily open any kind of Maven project, and being declarative, one can easily analyze pom.xml files. (I hate writing XML and I still like Maven.)

The next thing is Javas standard library. Well documented and big. Has it better and worse parts? Sure! But what people which never used a language with a good standard library don't get, is that even a bad standard library which is widely used is far better, than the npm-of-the-week clusterfuck, which means that nobody can read three lines of code and really understand, what is happening.

The IDEs are top notch, and you get even free ones (NetBeans, Eclipse) which can rival JetBrains and Visual Studio easily.

... and finally, Java is the only language that I know of, which has multiple strong companies and initiatives behind it, thanks that nobody trusts Oracle (rightfully).

Finally, Java code also got shorter, DI style is IMHO a very good default in any programming language (OOP, FP, Imperative), the community settled mostly on JUnit, so there are never discussions which of the 23 competing test frameworks to use...

In the end, there is a lot of rightful criticism of Java (historical baggage, too late when it comes to AOT, no modern GUI frameworks and a steep learning curve). Java getting new features with the new JDK releases is kind of double edged sword: Many things are good ideas, but they make the language more complicated at the same time.

The verbosity was IMHO never a big thing, because Java was always meant to be used in an IDE, for bigger projects explicit trumps implicit and finally newer revisions introduced stuff like 'var' statements etc.

It is kind of sad, that the Linux community never really jumped/accepted Java for desktop development (which might be explainable, when looking back at the lack of speed of Java in the 90s and the disastrous Solaris Java apps which were simply to slow to be usable).

Anyway, for work I am now using Golang, and it is hilarious how many lessons Golang did not learn from Java, when it comes to language design, although the tooling is top notch and the standard library has at least almost everything needed for writing backend services.

I don't see Java making a comeback, and I don't see anything modern going to replace java at the same time.