Most applications stopped being written in C/C++ when Java first came out - the first memory safe language with mass enterprise adoption. Java was the Rust of the mid-1990s, even though it used a GC which made it a lot slower and clunkier than actual Rust.

I would say that the "first" belongs to Smalltalk, Visual Basic and Delphi.

What Java had going for it was the massive scale of Sun's marketing, and the JDK being available as free beer, however until Eclipse came to be, all IDEs were commercial, and everyone was coding in Emacs, vi (no vim yet), nano, and so on.

However it only became viable after Java 1.3, when Hotspot became part of Java's runtime.

I agree with the spirit of your comment though, and I also think that the blow given by Java to C and C++ wasn't bigger, only because AOT tools were only available under high commercial prices.

Many folks use C and C++, not due to their systems programming features, rather they are the only AOT compiled languages that they know.