The JVM and the ecosystem it sustains are more important than Java itself. The main reason newer languages can run "everywhere" is because hardware has been commoditized and the number of server OSes has been reduced to two. The JVM was designed to flatten a much more diverse environment than what we have today. Whatever you produce that can run on the JVM will still be runnable in 30 years.
I strongly disagree with Kotlin being strictly better than Java. It pretends to fix things that haven't been problems in Java for more than 10 years while introducing a layer of syntactic complexity that's completely unwarranted. It just thrives on hype and Android development.
I've "ported" several legacy server side applications to kotlin over the years. I have no regrets.
That said I feel kotlin is almost a testbed language for java to steal features from at this point. Modern java is "good enough" now to warrant sticking with java these days. But back before some of the more recent java editions, kotlin was a boon to productivity, at least for me.
Luckily with "big" (feature and keyword wise) languages, you get to pick and choose what features you actually use. Obviously there are pros and cons, but in most cases you can control the complexity. The issue that remains is when a library or framework you use evolves to use more bells and whistles than you're comfortable with, but I'm general the kotlin community is finally large enough that there's always alternative libraries etc.
I generally just consumed the java libs directly in kotlin, sometimes with my own tiny shim layers for ergonomics. That way nothing crazy gets foisted on me w.r.t. orms etc.
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