It wasn’t. Java was very different from its current state before roughly Java 5. It felt like a downgrade from C++ to me at the time. C++ had templates and RAII and smart pointers, all of which Java lacked (and in some respects still lacks today). Not having something like the C preprocessor was quite annoying. Java performance wasn’t great. Tooling was better in some ways, worse in others. Linters did exist in C/C++, as did debug versions of libraries. You could load a crash dump into a debugger and could often get a pretty good picture of what went wrong. While Java certainly became preferable for business code, it wasn’t a sudden breath of fresh air, it was trade-offs that gradually became more favorable to it over the years.