It’s funny, I feel the same way about web development right now.
Except web development is almost all bootstrapped from a simple npm library these days. You generally npm install and you've got all your dependencies whether it's Angular, Vue, React or pretty much any modern web frameworks. The time for a new developer to get the tooling out of the way and start looking at code is dramatically shorter for web apps than Java in my experience.
It seems like you just don't know how to properly use maven. In my experience it is always as simple as mvn {build, compile, test, package, deploy}.
>Plus the acronyms.
GCJ and Excelsior are really niche, even people familiar with Java ecosystem might not known them as they are mostly used for AOT ( Ahead of Time ) Compiling Java into a Single redsitrbutuamble binary in the early 2000s. I was writing RSS Web Server application then and was looking into how to do Client Side Desktop Apps.... UI toolkit was a bag of hurt for Java, and I gathered that is still the case today.
I think JakartaEE is really just a rebranded JavaEE.
I know Graal only because I follow TruffleRuby, which is a new JVM written in Java. And it has proved that optimising Ruby, once thought as impossible due to its dynamic nature to be possible.
How is this any different than python or javascript? NPM, Babel, Webpack, TSC, PIP, VENV, PyPy, CPython, etc. They all have their learning curves and if you weren't in the ecosystem you wouldn't know what they meant.
The hardest part that everyone struggled with was getting a Java environment up and running. Gradle, maven, ant... You almost need and IDE. Its almost like they don't want people using it. I stopped when I didn't have too.
Plus the acronyms. Ones I didn't know from your post:
AOT, GCJ, Excelsior, Graal, OpenJDK, JakartaEE