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.