You can use Clojure to get all the goodness from Java and still have fun

That is a matter of taste. I enjoy programming in Java just fine.

I think this is a selection bias speaking rather than a reasonable reflection of what goes on in the Java world. Some insanely sophisticated and high quality technologies are written with Java.

The problem is like with JS or PHP, it is ubiquitous in many settings. There are a lot of people who can use it because it was the default language taught in CS programs, many corporate settings for decades, or similar. It’s the runtime for android devices. It’s everywhere. Of course you’ll encounter a lot of low quality developers.

Your comment mostly indicates that you haven’t been fortunate enough to encounter the high quality Java devs, not that they don’t exist. They exist and they build world class software that backs massive systems like elastic search, Kafka, spark, or Cassandra.

Compose Multiplatform is just a worse Flutter.

Compose and AOT compiled binaries would be amazing (GraalVM Native Image kinda thing) but it doesn't look very easy at the moment. Leyden with a regular JVM might be the best we get.

I think the UI look and feel was very ugly for many users and that caused its demise. The cross platform skin was ugly. The native skins were in the uncanny valley.

The framework was reasonably good for its time. By the time good looking UI frameworks came, the bad reputation was already set.

Yeah back then a java application could take several minutes to open.