A lot of folks prefer Scala or Kotlin even on a janky JVM.

Depends on the use-case, but I also like Elixir/Erlang, Julia, and Go.

Not all are very popular, yet each offer something uniquely beautiful. =3

Yet the only ecosystem with a mature library for every use case under the sun and that is not riddled with footguns is Java.

(One might argue Go comes close, though)

Javas selling point is that it can do everything reasonably well and has a huge talent pool.