A large chunk of the Netflix backend runs on the JVM. Much of it written in Java. While I agree that many devs avoid it like the plague, and I used to be one of them, once I let go of attachments to programming languages I found it quite a pleasant experience to develop software using Java.

Basically using Lombok and Vavr give you a very nice lightweight functional experience. Bells and whistles tend to be a distraction from making software that works and scales. I’d way rather focus on the hard problems in computing than how to most idiomatically or elegantly express things in a language.