There's a disturbingly low-level of historical knowledge passed along in programming. Some bits and pieces are encountered in a quality Computer Science curriculum, but usually in rarefied, theoretical form, and inevitably balkanized into drips and drabs as part of subject-oriented coursework.
New platforms bring exciting and meaningful evolution often at the cost of what techs like .net and Java have a few decade advantage in. It's also interesting to see what Java devs are innovating with themselves, Scala, Kotlin both have good things happening.
Maybe using one large, inter-syntax friendly world like JVM will help.
When experience is overlooked for youth, we relearn and reimplement the same libraries repeatedly in every new tech to feed some developers needs to build temples to their greatness.
Still, Fitzgeralds quote comes to mind... "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." and technology is held back by reinventing the wheel.
That hole I can credit as giving C# the advantage in that tight niche, and stilling the development of the JVM platform in general.
By the time that the rust on JVM improvements were dusted off, all initiative was lost. Java was playing catchup to the competition.
IBM gave up on the first counter proposal, Red-Hat and Google didn't bother to rescue Sun.
So we might even have been left with either Java 6 or being forced to port our applications.
Think about Java, it solved a class of problems that C was unable to address (e.g. unsafe memory, native threads). Thus enabling a new class of programs. But the new class of programs created opportunities for new platforms to solve with the benefit of a clean slate and fresh design having learned from past successes and failures.