I still don't see how Kotlin is involved. People drafting JEPs are well aware of how modern languages, including the ones running on the JVM, have evolved in the past decades. Kotlin is pretty late to the party and hasn't really brought anything new to the JVM (by choice), except for coroutines maybe.

Edit: see pron's comment below.

Kotlin becomes the default on Android, more people are writing Kotlin, there's more pressure on Java to adopt the best Kotlin features.

If you look at most of the recent additions to Java, they were in Kotlin from the beginning. This is no coincidence.

And they were in Scala, Groovy, C# ... before Kotlin was even a thing. There's zero evidence people on the OpenJDK governing board care about Android at all, rather the opposite.

Except Scala brought along some improvements and a whole managerie of other features to manage, Groovy with its gradual typing was simultaneously too far away from Java and yet too similar, and C# means opting into a whole different platform and perpetually living downstream of whatever MS wants to do.

Kotlin absolutely nailed the "meaningfully better than Java while staying pedantically true to the existing semantics" in a way that none of the alternatives did even if they did come first.

It is still completely irrelevant to Java's evolution since Java 7.