What was the core of the hype at the time was parallel processing. And to be honest, here Java absolutely beats C, which most of the time will simply.. refuse to parallelize because it can't be maintainably and reliably done in the language without some very extreme cost. It's simply too dangerous. Meanwhile in Java people could freely experiment with concurrent data structures and algorithms that will simply be in a completely different league than the serial C program. Sure, maybe the latter's hot loop is faster, but it doesn't mean much if I can just run 100s of threads with Java.

Your second paragraph is just thoroughly uninformed, though. And unused RAM is useless, so in a server application not making use of it is just dumb. Maybe think about why Java is used extensively by pretty much every FAANG company. Also, Java has improved steadily after Oracle's takeover, and is in fact the open-source reference implementation. Again, uninformed bullshit.

> Maybe think about why Java is used extensively by pretty much every FAANG company.

Java programmers are a dime a dozen. Universities churn out heaps of Java code slaves, so of course every big company will use Java for their shovelware.